


Quantum Suicide (9 to 5)

by yellow_caballero



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Alyx as Princess of Antifa and natural disaster, American Sign Language, Barney as President of Antifa and gay disaster, Deaf Character, Disabled Character, Gen, Gordon as Messiah/Torpedo of Antifa and just all-around disaster, Inter-generational trauma, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, We are absolutely CHUGGING respect and love Alyx Vance juice, Worldbuilding, difficult family relationships, the forests are all dead but Barney's still pining, the machinas and HLVRAI are apocrypha in the bible of freeman and also playground games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:27:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 40,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25903576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: The generation that came of age during the occupation of Earth by the Combine, colloquially known as ‘The Last Generation’, was a unique assembly of soldiers, survivors, and fighters. Their childhood nursery rhymes sang the legend of their liberator Gordon Freeman; their early education was in survival instead of literacy. To a human who had not spent their childhood in warfare, they were borderline incomprehensible.To Gordon Freeman, their college professor, they were a headache.In which Gordon Freeman teaches community college, Alyx Vance has her great coming of age story, and Barney Calhoun pines like extinct vegetation. And in which everybody grows older, but nobody grows up.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun/Gordon Freeman, Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance, Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance & Barney Calhoun
Comments: 46
Kudos: 209





	1. Gordon Freeman's Big Day!

**Author's Note:**

> Did not expect myself to write another Half-Life fic, much less a fic for a game I've seen about twenty minutes of footage of and that's it, but here we are! This fic is mostly an excuse for myself to play around in the world of Half-Life, and as such it's pretty slice of life. However, there is a lot of discussion of PTSD, war trauma, some period typical 90s internalized homophobia, and Captain Planet, so just keep an eye out for that. Beginning quote of first chapter is from Edward Abbot, author of Flatland. 
> 
> As another note: this fic has three protagonists, all of whom are equally important to the story. I absolutely adore Alyx Vance and this fic is absolutely chugging respect + adore her juice, and you should too. I also want to give gratuitous credit to Nymm_at_night for ranting about Half-Life to me at two am until I started to have opinions on it too as well as for her copyediting skills, and to LazuliQuetzal for plot jamming with me. 
> 
> Have fun with this slice-of-life sitcom plot about how war damages the world, children, and all future generations!

_ “Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time.” _

  
  


It was Barney’s idea. 

All bad ideas were Barney’s ideas. All good ideas too. Barney was the only one who ever regularly had ideas, actually, and even if he had as many hits as misses at least you could always rely on him to make the effort to come up with something. Eli and Magnusson were also pretty recognizable for coming up with good, or at least somehow effective, ideas, but they were irregular at best and mostly impractical. Kleiner’s ideas all involved a US Military budget, which was why he was back at White Forest frolicking with headcrabs. Alyx also very reliably had ideas, but they frequently only made sense to her. Gordon had never had an idea in his life. So that left Barney. 

It was during a meeting. This was also far from unusual. The leadership of the Resistance, an artifact name that was no longer accurate, had meetings roughly once daily, about things that they had done and what they had to do and fixing problems. They had meetings so regularly that it made it difficult to do anything or fix any problems, and in fact many of them devolved into bickering - if not between Eli and Magnusson about advancements in the portal technology, then between the leader of their Belgian cell and their French cell about food supply lines, or between the Labor and the Transport officials about how to feed their reconstruction workers, or between everybody and Uriah, who found him creepy and tended to disagree with him on principle. The only person who made any real or effective overtures to mediate was Barney, which got him elected leader because nobody else had wanted to do it. 

Barney getting elected the leader of the Rebellion slash world government would have been funny two weeks ago. It was still pretty funny. But it was mostly strange, and it seemed to stress Barney out a little. Gordon had the sense that he didn’t know what to do with responsibility anymore than Gordon did, but it was a job that nobody else wanted to do that needed to be done. So he did. Maybe that was the kind of person Barney was - always taking the bad jobs. 

The argument had been about - well, something. Gordon spent the entire meeting, that he only attended because everybody told him he had to as “savior of the free world” or something, dazedly staring at his speech-to-text screen and pretending to read the quibbles as he killed fascists in his head. His finger twitched, pulling a phantom trigger. So he really didn’t know what the argument was about. But he knew that Alyx tapped at his shoulder, looking inquisitively at him. 

“Well?” Alyx asked, in the choppy and strange half-sign that Gordon had written off as another one of her dozens of weird little quirks until he had seen every other person under thirty using it, and some older ones too. “Will you do it?”

As usual, Gordon unthinkingly engaged in the one instinct that always got him into the worst trouble of his life, and unthinkingly agreed with whatever random people wanted to do. He tilted his fist quickly, masking his confusion under the blank and somewhat dead gaze that everyone seemed to always expect from him, and the faces of everyone around the table lit up in satisfaction and happiness. 

“This is perfect,” the Head of Transportation said, his bristly white moustache ruffling in the smooth, slow oscillations of the fan. Their technology was powered by alien innovation, yet the AC was always broken. How was that for the future? “A nice, public, useful place to put Dr. Freeman. He’ll certainly draw crowds.”

“It’s valuable work too,” the leader of the England cell agreed, Gordon’s small screen scrolling her words. “We have a real shortage of scientists to do it.”

“Real stupid of the ‘Bine to kill our educated people if they needed our portal tech so bad,” the Head Mechanic noted. “So it’s settled, then. Unless we have any leftover cells of ‘Bine we need to flush out?”

“The militia are working effectively on that,” Alyx said, her hands twisting out ‘gun’ and ‘ka-pow! Dead alien!’ - the sign of which was just a little explosion and the F hand sign. “It’s too risky to put Dr. Freeman where some fash simps could get at him, anyway.” Her hands twisted out ‘traitors’. “I think this is a great idea.”

“Honestly, dear,” the England leader said, “please do speak properly.”

“Sorry.” Alyx put her hands in her lap. “But it’s still a good idea.”

“Let’s bring it to a vote, then,” Barney announced, from his position at the head of the table. He glanced at Gordon, and almost pointedly signed along with his words in the familiar, classic, outdated ASL style. “All in favor of Gordon Freeman acting as Free Europe’s first college instructor, say aye.”

The resulting mass echo of one word overwhelmed Gordon’s machine, but the point was moot, anyway. Gordon knew what they had said. 

“Great,” Gordon typed. 

  
  
  


“It’s your own fault for not paying attention during meetings,” Alyx told him later, tearing open a ration pack with her teeth. 

Just went to show that even after the facist (or, as Alyx called them with her disturbing tendency to shorten and slang words that no human being should have to say so frequently, ‘fash’) alien governments left, everyone was still standing in line for ration bars. The only difference was that the supply lines were disrupted and there were, paradoxically,  _ less  _ ration bars, but the upside was that less people were beat to death in line for them. Gordon, Barney, and Alyx, as leaders of the free world, did not have to wait in line for ration bars. That was a perk. To think: only two weeks ago, Gordon had to wait in line for five whole minutes for Black Mesa slop and gruel. Now people just handed him food for free. No line needed. His life really had only improved. 

They were all sitting in their cramped dormitory, which at least was familiar. They had all been forced to relocate to City 11 - sorry, New Paris - when the Resistance made the city its home base, but as neither Alyx or Barney seemed surprised or bothered by the sudden uprooting of their lives Gordon didn’t feel bothered about it either. He took most of his cues from them. 

Gordon had been in Paris for a conference once. Stood around helpfully as his co-author gave a presentation on gravitational wells. It had been two years ago, and Gordon hadn’t had the chance to see much of the city, but he knew it looked different then this. Most of the historic architecture had been bulldozed, and replaced with factories to produce weaponry for the Combine army or prefab buildings for infrastructure and moving humans around. It was all very efficient and economic. Gordon appreciated that about it. Gordon was an efficient person. 

Anyway, it had been efficient to share a dormitory. Gordon needed Barney around because he didn’t understand jack or shit about this brave new world, and where Gordon went Alyx could usually be found in his shadow. She had happily appointed herself his lab assistant, which she seemed to think consisted of fetching guns, shooting aliens, and translating Gordon’s demands for surrender. Alyx had a very spotty and strange idea of what exactly a scientist  _ did _ , especially for the daughter of two scientists, but in her defense Eli had always been a little weird. 

So when they all moved into the Resistance headquarters a month back, they moved in together. It had only made sense. It had made Alyx enthusiastically sign something confusing about how oh my god, they were bunkmates and sharing one pulse rifle that made Barney cough frantically. 

Now, they sat on a sagging and somewhat rotted twenty year old couch. Alyx perched on the stained wood coffee table, frantically gulping down water flavored ration bars. Barney slouched on the couch next to Gordon, mechanically chewing his own food seemingly without tasting it. 

“I really gotta say, dude,” Barney said, chewing his food like a cow with cud, “I always remembered the way you never really paid attention to anything anyone was saying, but I chalked that up to the language barrier. But we got you that fancy text to speech, speech to text AAC tablet, almost everyone uses the pidgin sign, and finally the whole world’s speaking your language, and you  _ still  _ never pay attention. I think you just like zoning out.”

“People are boring,” Gordon agreed easily, crumpling the empty wrapper and putting it on the table for recycling. “So summarize, then.”

“Well, we need teachers, right?” Alyx said enthusiastically. “None of us have ever been allowed to go to school. Dad homeschooled me, but he was always real -” she said something with her mouth, while circling her pointer finger around her head - “you know? He used to hold classes for the base kids, but anyway! We need the guardians of knowledge to hack into the knowledge banks and redistribute the capital! It’ll be fun!”

“Most people basically know how to read and write, and however far they got in their education before the Seven Hour War, and that’s about it,” Barney said wryly. He used the sign everybody used for the war, the pidgin leaking into his own relatively prim dialect - the sign for the world, and then the sign for explosion. “We’ll need an educated populace if we ever want to rebuild. And the longer we wait, the less educated populace we have.”

“If everybody’s undereducated, then why do you need a community college teacher?” Gordon asked. “Find a surviving primary school teacher.”

Alyx glanced at Barney, who quickly fingerspelled community college, and when that didn’t get through said something verbally to her, throwing in the pidgin for ‘pre-war’ and ‘extinct’. To Gordon, he said, “We’ll have those too. But you need something to do too, dude. It’ll be good for you to get back out there, not murdering things.”

“I did so many things in my life before this,” Gordon said in wonder, “ _ none  _ of which were murder.”

“Really?” Alyx asked, impressed. “Like what?”

“I was a theoretical physicist,” Gordon said flatly, still somewhat in disbelief that Alyx knew the sign for theoretical physicist but not the sign for college. “You know this.  _ Everybody  _ knows this.”

“Yeah, but that’s like a kind of murder, right?” Alyx snapped her fingers in thought. “Like, a tool for murder.”

Gordon and Barney looked at each other. 

“There may be some...unique challenges,” Barney said delicately. 

Maybe spending his time bashing the fash would be safer than dealing with the young populace of this new world. Gordon sighed, reaching for another ration bar. “Are you sure you don’t have any more aliens you need killing instead?”

“I keep some in the foot locker under my bed!” Alyx volunteered. “I could let them out, like little fleshy clay pigeons.”

“Those would just be pigeons, Alyx,” Barney said, exhausted. 

“They make flesh clay pigeons?” Alyx asked, horrified. “Where do they get the flesh?”

Maybe this would be more difficult than Gordon thought. 

The conversation moved on after that into Barney threatening to make a Baby’s First Barnyard Book for Alyx yet again, but Gordon found himself ruminating on the prospect of teaching. As a doctorate, he had done plenty of teaching undergraduates while he was in school - well, actually, he hadn’t, due to the language barrier, but he had sure graded papers. Teaching was mostly just grading papers, right? How hard could it be?

Gordon was pretty sure he could teach gravitational wells, the theory of portal development, and how to rupture the space-time continuum. He could teach how to shoot a gun, how to infiltrate a building, and how to liberate a world. He wasn’t as confident about his ability to teach basic math. This really was a question for his elementary school math teacher. 

Hopefully they would only give him the advanced students. You know, forty and fifty year olds, interrupted in their own graduate schooling. Train up the next generation of scientists. Scientists seemed to be regarded in the same weight class as Rambo and Schwarzenneger in the future, surely it had to be a popular profession. Right?

Soon enough, a messenger knocked on the door, a young man about Gordon’s age, and Gordon caught something about the Vortigaunts wanting a meeting with Barney. Barney grimaced apologetically at them, did that weird resistance comrade handshake with Alyx and thumped Gordon on the back, and left them alone in the dorm. 

As usual, the minute Barney left both Gordon and Alyx started the countdown for when he would be back. Alyx shrugged and ducked inside her room so she could change into her workout clothes and promptly begin engaging in her terrifying bodyweight workout routines that she broke into about once every two hours, and Gordon half-heartedly began to shift through the developments in physics literature that he had been reading on and off for the last few weeks. The stack was both intimidatingly thick and, for  _ every single piece of scientific physics development in the last twenty years _ , crushingly small. 

But his mind drifted, and soon enough he found himself reading the same line over and over again, his pencil halting on his notebook page where he had been taking notes. What was the point? Nobody really expected him to do physics anymore. If he applied himself and studied for months he would gradually start to understand what the fuck Eli and Magnusson were constantly on about. He could go back to White Forest and spend his time with Kleiner, renewing his mentorship and petting Lamarr. He could work with the Vorts and collaborate with them to push science even further. In an era of peace, in an era that prioritized scientific development and recognized it as a key weapon in the fight to defend Earth, the field could boom. 

But Gordon didn’t know when the man in the suit was going to pluck him from solid ground like picking lice off a dog, and leave him in stasis until there was another job to be done. What was the point? There was no life for him here, not permanently. Might as well waste time doing something fun. 

If only he knew where to start. 

A pencil hit Gordon on the head, and Gordon looked up to see Alyx doing push-ups while in a one-handed handstand. With her free hand, she twisted out, “Moping Chief gone? Miss battle partner? Cute!”

“You’re indecipherable,” Gordon said stoically. “I’m just thinking.”

“A distracted right hand gets stolen from by the left,” Alyx said, wriggling her right hand before lightly knocking it into her left wrist and pulling a complex maneuver to hop onto her right hand, wriggling her left in turn. “Worried?”

“I don’t worry too often,” Gordon said honestly. Alyx flipped back up in one smooth, graceful motion, barely even sweating from the intense work-out. “I’m just not sure where to even start with the teaching thing.”

“Come on,” Alyx said, smiling a crooked half-grin at him, “let’s go for a walk.”

He was afraid that she would say that. 

The Resistance headquarters was a large prefab tower, stretching up thirty stories and always crawling with humans and Vorts. The uppermost levels were management, conference rooms, and administrative work, the middle levels were where the scientific breakthroughs happened, and the lower levels were living areas and the daily mundanities of living. Every floor was closed to the public save the first, to stop ‘simps’ from running terrorist attacks on the place, but in general Combine-Earth architecture wasn’t known for its windows or its friendliness. Cheap, uniform, and mass-produced was the name of the game. It reminded Gordon a lot of old office complexes and strip malls. 

A walk, by Alyx’s definition, was usually a loop of the hallways, wandering aimlessly with no intention other than stretching her legs. That was Alyx: constantly in motion, as if staying still was a vulnerability that she couldn’t afford. He never saw her outside the dorm without a handgun strapped to her thigh. But he never saw her walk down a hallway without greeting someone either, and never saw her leave a person in trouble alone if they seemed to need help. That was Alyx too: everything at once. 

But when Gordon joined her, being around people was usually overwhelming. The Resistance members were usually too professional or polite to stop him and salute and thank both him and Alyx for his service whenever they saw them, but the stares were unabashed and uncomfortable. The people of the future had a strong sense of discretion, not being a busybody, and of minding your own business, but they had very little sense for propriety or politeness. Alyx frequently stared at him without blinking and followed him around, but it wasn’t until she had decided that they were friends that she ever asked him what he was thinking or what was bothering him. 

She had never even asked him where he had been those twenty years. Nobody had. Only Barney, who was such a perfect mixture of old and new, who stood firm and steadfast in both worlds, had even thought to mention it. 

In silent agreement, they took the industrial lift down to the first floor, ignoring the small bubble forming around Gordon that Alyx shamelessly took advantage of. Passing soldiers, workers, and administrators stared at Gordon as he ignored them, stopping only when Alyx ran into a friend and they both had to stop so she could gossip happily with them for an excruciating amount of time. 

Normally Gordon just zoned out when this happened, but for the first time in a while Gordon found himself paying attention to her easy and friendly conversation with the young man with a guard’s armband and a pulse rifle slung over one shoulder. Her lips flapped as the man laughed at her joke. As they spoke, their hands formed words that emphasized their point, gave subtext or clarified an additional meaning to a word, or delivered the punchline to a joke. The signs themselves were a hodge-podge of ASL, BSL, colloquial English gestures, slang, and what Alyx kept on insisting was a ‘meme’. 

Surreptitiously, Gordon checked the small screen attached to his gauntlet that he rarely turned on unless he had to. He flipped it on, waiting a second for the microphone to pick up and translate the spoken words into scrolling text on the screen. 

“ - and then I said, that’s no Vort, that’s my Mama!” the boy said, hands signing out the slang for ‘gigantic big fuck-off gun’, which seemed to also refer to overbearing parents. Alyx laughed appreciatively. “Anyway, what’re you up to, Alyx?”

“Just helping out here and there,” Alyx said, signing out ‘Dad’, ‘Chief’, and ‘Free Chief’. The guard glanced at Gordon appreciatively. “Not really anything exciting, though…”

“Why didn’t you take an admin job? They offered you one, right?” The guard signed out ‘authority-good’, tilting his head. “Or that scientist job?”

“They didn’t need me,” Alyx said dismissively, waving a hand. “I want to do something that only I can do, you know? Anybody can lead a country or shoot a gun or do combat science. I gotta stick where Alyx Vance is needed, you know?”

“Badass as usual, Alyx,” the guard said appreciatively, signing out ‘hero-icon-idol-star’. Alyx laughed self-consciously. “Say hello to -” he signed out ‘Free Chief’ - “ for me, will you?”

“Tell him yourself, Henri!”

“Aw, I can’t…” Henri glanced nervously at Gordon, before forcing his eyes down. “Catch you on the flip side, Alyx.” He bumped forearms with her and nodded respectfully at Gordon before heading back to his route, walking somewhat quickly. 

Gordon, for his part, thumbed his screen off and resumed walking with her, pretending that he hadn’t been listening in. They soon filtered into the lobby, waving at the receptionist and the five armored guards standing at every entrance and patting down anyone who walked in. They saluted stiffly at Alyx and Gordon, who respectively saluted back and ignored them, and they ducked out of the back doors of the lobby and entered the courtyard. 

Courtyards were a luxury, a green space normally meant for human psychological health that the Combine hadn’t really bothered with. However, this building had once served as an administrative building for the Overwatch, and what was now a courtyard had once been an outdoor training and weapons center. Those areas had been ripped up by some enterprising Resistance official, someone had stuck a bunch of benches and set up sticks and rope for soccer games, and now it was the closest thing they had to a recreation center. There was even a jogging trail. It was all very picturesque. 

Or it would have been, if the grass was healthy and the soil rich. Instead, it looked as most things in the future did: half-dead, limping along, abused and overused until its life could barely be called a life.

It was a good thing Gordon had never been much of an outdoorsman. Man, what he  _ really  _ missed was the internet. That had been fun. Maybe someone would set up a resistance Usenet or something. Maybe Gordon could do it. 

The courtyard was lightly populated, with a small pick-up game happening at the court and couples sitting at the benches. Friends sat on regulation ration blankets and chatted with each other, enjoying the sunshine. Gordon walked next to Alyx, her hands swinging loosely as she craned her head to look all around the courtyard, drinking in what passed for trees and flora. 

Eventually she found something fascinating on the ground, and wandered off a little to pick it up. It was just a stick, small and unremarkable, but Alyx’s face broke into a bright grin. With quick, deft movements, she uprooted some of the grass and weeds, tying them around the stick. She crouched down at the grass, grabbing a dandelion and weaving it around the stick. Soon enough, through using the grass as thread and stuffing, what vaguely resembled a doll began to take shape in her hands. 

Gordon walked over and crouched next to her, trying to see what she saw. Alyx glanced at him, smiling widely, and waved the doll in his face. “I think this one’s Gordon Freeman!”

What. Gordon blinked, still half a step behind in translating ‘Free Chief’ as his own name. “Excuse me?”

“I lost my Alyx doll...oh, so many moves back. I wonder what happened to it.” Alyx smiled down at the little doll made out of twigs and grass, almost fond, and Gordon knew that she was seeing something very different than he was. Something translated through the filter of time, through the imaginative mind of a child. “It was just a shirt turned rag turned doll, with some old bandages as stuffing. Loved that stupid thing. Even if it always smelled like blood. We had to move from that base so quickly, I forgot it. I cried for days.” She wiggled the doll again, made it dance. “Alyx and Gordon on adventure. Alyx and Gordon doing science. Alyx and Gordon liberating bases. Alyx and Gordon bashing the fash. Alyx and Gordon riding dolphins to The Island of Blue Dolphins and saving the whales. I used to fight with the other kids over who got to be Gordon and who had to be the Vorts...”

She trailed off a little, abruptly embarrassed. Almost as embarrassed as Gordon, actually. Just what had Eli  _ told  _ her? 

Or maybe it was more about what everyone else had told her. The other kids, the adults, the fables. Maybe it wasn’t really about Gordon at all. Maybe Gordon, himself, was incidental towards all of this. 

“I’m only three years older than you, you know,” Gordon said, instead of any of that. He held out his hand and Alyx carefully placed the little doll in it. He squinted at it. It had his nose. 

“Really?” Alyx asked, pulling a sarcastic face. “Because I could have swore you were an immoral emissary from heaven sent to deliver us.”

“I’m afraid I kicked off the Rapture in ‘93,” Gordon said, with a straight face. “Nobody noticed.”

“For what it’s worth,” Alyx said, reaching out to take the doll from him, slipping her lithe and leathery hand in his, “I’m not sure Gordon Freeman as how Jose used to always play him would make a very good roommate.”

“If I understand correctly, Alyx Vance always played the best Gordon.”

“You bet!” Alyx bragged, jerking a thumb at her chest. She puffed out her chest, adopting a serious glower and pantomiming hold a crowbar. She even hopped up and down a little bit on the grass, swinging around the crowbar to smash it in the face of imaginary headcrabs. “Watch out, aliens! Gordon Freeman’s here to save humanity with science, and he’s all out of portal technology! Don’t fuck with the science team!”

Another young woman, who had been sitting on the bench with her boyfriend and half-watching Alyx and Gordon out of the corner of her eye, burst into a familiar grin. Her boyfriend waved and mimicked the pidgin sign ‘Don’t fuck with the science team’ perfectly, a childhood slogan bandied about with familiarity. 

Alyx waved the two over enthusiastically, and a group of people sitting on a blanket near them hollered something too, and before long Alyx was gathering a crowd of young people, laughing over old childhood games. Gordon saw two boys mimic shooting a gun, scowling mightily and switching entirely from spoken language to sign, and he realized with a start that they were playing Gordon Freeman. If he was catching their pidgin right, the other boy had elected himself ‘John Freeman’, Gordon Freeman’s equally competent and badass brother. Who...didn’t exist, but that probably wasn’t important. 

The girlfriend and Alyx were cooing over Alyx’s little dolls, and at a quick gesture from Alyx they began laughingly recalling a clapping game. It was entirely spoken, obviously, with some exaggerated gestures, and Gordon silently thumbed on his AAC device. 

“They said Mr. Freeman killed the crabs a bunch,” Alyx and her friend sang, giggling over the silliness. “They said Mr. Freeman ate barnacles for lunch. They said Mr. Freeman blew the military away. They said Mr. Freeman's coming back some day!” The two girls laughed and pantomimed spraying a rifle. “They said Mr. Freeman could smell your blood, they said Mr. Freeman hit your head with a thud. One, two, three, four, how many Vorts at your door? One, two, three four, how many Overwatch at your door?”

Maybe it was in his face, how strange and off-balance Gordon was, because Alyx turned around and smiled at him. “I guess you never played ‘Don’t fuck with the science team!’ huh, Gordon?”

“I played cops and robbers,” Gordon said, still slightly distrubed. “So...maybe I did. The cops were always the good guys, though.”

“They said Mr. Freeman smelled like a corpse,” two grown women sang, caught in nostalgia for the last generation on Earth. “They said Mr. Freeman went to space with a fork. They said he did it to eat aliens all night. They said don’t worry, he’s coming back tonight!”

“Cops? Good guys?” Alyx laughed, teeth flashing yellow in the tepid sun. “You’re so funny, Gordon! Next you’ll be telling me your Papa never hung up the crowbar in the windows to ward away the spirit of death!”

“Yeah, bad news,” Gordon said. 

“Let’s play Gorgeous Freeman!” a boy signed enthusiastically, which for some reason made Alyx immediately tackle the boy around the waist and pin him into the ground. 

“Not in front of the man himself, Ivan! Idiot! Stop! He’ll never recover!”

The young woman on the bench, wearing a sundress and a plastic flower in her hair, cautiously approached Gordon. She smiled falteringly at him, even as her boyfriend gave her a supportive thumbs-up in the background. 

Slowly, carefully, as formally as she could without any of the spoken word or slang of the pidgin, she signed out, “Want us to teach you how to play Freeman and Overwatch, Chief?”

For some reason, from a long forgotten impulse Gordon couldn’t begin to understand, he found himself tilting his fist. His tendency to just agree to things was going to get him into trouble someday, if it hadn’t already - but maybe, today, it could be fun. “Only if I get to be Freeman.”

Through a bizarre series of events, Gordon and the Last Generation chased each other through the grass, until they felt like him and he felt like them, and he realized that there was no significant difference, and that they were the same, until they had to be called up back home for dinner. 

  
  
  


When Gordon and Alyx finally stumbled back into the dorm, grass stained and muddy and thoroughly out of breath, Barney was already waiting for them on the couch. He was holding a mug of the tasteless energy drink that just existed to keep humans working on the factory line for 48 hours straight. It had become so popular in the human black market it was a restricted substance. Gordon was pretty sure there was cocaine in it but he and his borderline morphine addiction had no room to talk. 

Barney himself lived off it and swore up and down that it was delicious, satisfying, and even better tasting than coffee. Gordon had tried some and determined that it tasted like rotten motor fuel, and he had the suspicion that Barney didn’t entirely remember what coffee tasted like. He didn’t say anything - it seemed cruel, especially when Barney loved to regale Alyx with tales of what old world food used to taste like in its delectable freshness and crispness with sometimes dubious accuracy. 

His feet were propped up on the coffee table, barely nudging aside a thick stack of textbooks. Alyx gasped happily, despite her exhaustion, and Gordon eyed them warily. 

“Liberated from our storage,” Barney said smugly. Alyx’s body language indicated that she was squealing in excitement, sliding forward to sit at the coffee table and immediately leaf through the books with a practiced eye. “Look familiar, Alyx?”

“Fuck yeah! These are from the Resistance homeschool pool!” At Gordon’s confused look, Alyx quickly elaborated. “When me and the other Resistance kids were...well, kids, sometimes the scientists would homeschool us on the downlow. It’s where I learned everything I know about mechanics and coding. Some of it was real useless -” she carefully pushed aside an English textbook, lip curling, but she dragged a few other books in closer. “ - but some of it was worth its weight in gold.” She held the book up for Gordon to see it. Introduction to French I. “See? Seditious literature, in textbook form! So stellar!”

“You were a terrible student,” Barney said, half-amused. At Gordon’s look, he followed it up with, “Whenever I was on layover from whatever undercover gig I was running I used to help out with the kids. Reminded me of...anyway, Alyx never wanted to do anything but learn science. I keep on telling her that  _ some  _ knowledge of history is useful. Those who don’t learn history -”

“ - are doomed to repeat it,” Alyx signed sarcastically, rolling her eyes for effect. Despite her words, she lovingly put an American History book on her lap, carefully leafing through the whisper thin pages as if they were made of gold. “Yeah, what _ ever _ , Unc -”

Her hands closed into fists halfway through the word, and Barney said something sharply verbally to her, and Alyx said something sharply back, and they engaged in a strangely intense conversation. Just as Barney’s hands were drifting to the screen on his gauntlet, both of his roommates abruptly cut themselves off, and Alyx suddenly left the room. 

The two men stood in awkward silence for a minute, Barney frowning at his drink as if he wished it was something stronger. Gordon wasn’t good with feelings, and held no desire to deal with his or anyone else’s. Especially Barney and Alyx’s. But…

“What was that all about?”

Barney abruptly flattened his hand and flicked it at the wrist, telling Gordon to forget about it. His mouth was tight and drawn, and for just a second he really looked his almost fifty years. 

Not that he ever really did. More strangeness, more bizarre little corners of Barney that Gordon couldn’t understand. 

“It’s not polite to talk over me while I’m right here,” Gordon said sharply, and this time Barney did wince. 

He rubbed a fist in a circle over his chest, eyes suddenly tired. “Sorry. It’s just...she knows how dangerous it is.”

“How dangerous what is?”

“Just drop it,” Barney said shortly, and because Barney asked for so little from Gordon he did. He would talk about it when he was ready. 

Instead, he bent down and poked through the textbooks. They were varied, clearly scavenged from whatever could be recovered from ruins. Gordon had picked up that it had been severely illegal to educate humans, although most parents had made efforts to at least subtly teach their children how to read. Fourth grade English textbook, seventh grade World History book, high school level Psychology textbook. The oldest seemed to be from the 70s, and the newest was from ‘92. How had Alyx even  _ learned  _ coding? She was pretty amazing. 

“Why is the French textbook seditious?” Gordon asked finally, using Alyx’s slang term for seditious - holding a finger to his mouth, as if it was a whisper. Again, a disturbingly common slang term. “It’s just French.”

Barney winced, reflexively looking around for cameras. Some topics - like sex, or freedom, or Gordon Freeman - scared people. “Haven’t you wondered why everyone in Europe speaks English?”

“No, not really.” Gordon didn’t even speak English.

“Uh. Fair.” Barney ran a hand through limp and dirty hair, and Gordon was abruptly reminded that the guy spoke five languages fluently just from his several gap years backpacking across Europe. He had been thinking of quitting his security guard job and getting licensed as a translator before...well. “Uh, Combine only ever learned English, so they made all other languages seditious. About everyone on Earth only verbally speaks English. That, uh, pidgin that the kids use, was kind of this organic language that sprung up as a secret language. Sign’s popular just because...uh, because the Combine don’t have the dexterity for it and they can’t understand it, and it’s a silent method of communication and all that jazz. Kids grew up on sign, and they made up new signs and mixed it with gestures and body language, and now they’re all always spitting this confusing mix of sign and English. It’s both a political thing and a kid slang thing and a Resistance thing and a usefulness thing. You picked up on it pretty fast, honestly, I was surprised.”

Something large was being omitted. “And I’m just guessing that I have nothing to do with this.”

“Of course not,” Barney said, with a perfect poker face, “Nobody ever paid any attention to how you caused the alien invasion, were the lone man to liberate a slave race, established yourself as the only human being alive who battled his way out from the heart of the invasion and survived only to disappear in the wind, and then reappeared twenty years later when we needed you most and saved the entire planet. We’ll all just forget about it in a week.”

“Don’t pretend as if you have nothing to do with this.”

“Are you kidding?” Barney barked a laugh, lazy grin spreading across his face without humor. “I exaggerated the  _ shit  _ out of it. I told everybody I met. I told them to tell their friends. I spread the gospel of Freeman with my own two hands. I made sure that your sacrifice would never be forgotten, and that your legend would be told.”

“Why?” Gordon asked, surprising himself with his vehemence. “What was the point of all of that?”

“We needed someone,” Barney said, infuriatingly calm. “We needed hope. Earth’s culture was being eradicated, and I knew that we needed our John Henry. Our steel driving man.” Something strange and vulnerable cracked across his face, where vulnerability was almost foreign now. “And because I thought you were dead, you son of a bitch.”

They stood awkwardly for a minute, not talking. Gordon didn’t know how to feel or what to do or how to act. He never really did anymore. He got the sense, somehow, that Barney was damaged in a way that Gordon didn’t even know how to begin to understand, and that there was nothing he could do about it. 

Finally, all Gordon could weakly say was, “Everybody lost somebody.”

“Nobody else lost you,” Barney said simply, and Gordon was stunned into speechlessness. “I was the only person alive who had lost you. I couldn’t bear it. If I - if I had to live without you, I wanted every single motherfucker on Earth to know what the fuck we were missing.” He stopped short, fisting his hands in his cotton pants instead of speaking, before he started again. “So what topic do you want to teach? Beginner, Intermediate, or advanced? We could probably hook you up with actual ex-graduate students, if you really want to pass on your specialty. Most of our classes are going to be older, thirty to sixty year olds, and we all figured that you’d be more comfortable with that pop, but there’s going to be a youth class that I might ask Alyx to take over -”

“Give me the youth class,” Gordon interrupted, and Barney stopped short with raised eyebrows. “The kids. I’ll teach them.”

“You speak an entirely different language.”

“I’ll pick it up.”

“They have literally never been to a formal school before.”

“It’s not hard to teach arithmetic.”

“They’re all insane.”

And Gordon let himself smile, knowing how terrifying it was. “So am I.”

Exactly on cue, Alyx popped back into the room, very effectively demonstrating that she had been spying on them through the cameras again. “I call teacher’s assistant!”

Barney groaned. Gordon, personally, had no idea why. This could only go great. 

  
  
  


After that, things happened both very slowly and very quickly. 

Gordon started juggling flipping through recent literature and outdated children’s textbooks, faded yellow and moth eaten math workbooks as good as gold. He spent half an hour photocopying the cleanest one he had found before a horrified administrator insisted on doing it for him, because apparently Gordon Freeman was too good to do menial tasks. This attitude would have been useful at Black Mesa, where all of his coworkers had kept on giving him research assistant level tasks, but now it was just another weird thing to get used to. At least Eli still bossed him around. 

After that, Alyx took care of photocopying, grabbing materials, and digging up an overhead projector and a few dried-out reusable pens that they managed to resuscitate by dipping them in a mysterious substance that the Vorts promised would work. Gordon spent more and more time huddled over his desk, trying to sketch out plans and reading as many books as they could scavenge on how to teach basic math. How hard could it be? Literally nothing was easier than long division. A headcrab could do it. Why was it so hard to teach?

At a certain point, Gordon had to accept that he had no idea where his students would be at, and that probably everybody would be at a different level, and thus planning was stupid and all of the teaching would have to be done on the fly. This was how Gordon worked best, and he promptly settled for gathering as wide a variety of resources as possible. He tried to think of it as expanding his arsenal of knowledge. It shouldn’t be hard - if there was one thing a doctorate in theoretical physics understood it was school, right? Right?

Barney was out more than he was in, always putting out fires both literal and figurative and mediating fights. He insisted that he didn’t have the right to make any decisions, that he wasn’t a real leader or a real commander or anything, that he was just Barney. Gordon wasn’t so sure. He saw Barney during Resistance leadership meetings - always the final vote, and always the deciding one. It was Barney who decided the group opinion, Barney who kept everybody in order. 

It was bizarre and incongruous with the lazy, slacking, under-achiever that Gordon knew. This guy couldn’t even stay awake through a company orientation, and now every young adult used the respectful ‘Chief’ moniker for him. 

Maybe he just hadn’t found a meaning, back then. That had always been Barney: purposeless, undriven, indecisive. But Gordon had the feeling that you couldn’t survive long in this brave new world without a purpose, living meaninglessly and just scraping from day to day. Life wasn’t worth living like that. 

Had Gordon become Barney’s meaning? It felt like he had. Gordon didn’t really know what to do with that. Maybe he should just never mention it, and hope it never comes up again. That seemed like a healthy and normal emotional response. 

And even if it wasn’t - was  _ anybody  _ emotionally healthy around here?

Maybe Alyx. She wasn’t normal, or even sane, but what she had going on seemed to be working for her. It was somehow reassuring that she was trying to figure out her place in the world, and what she wanted to be when she established her life. When Gordon was her age, he had been...well, he had already been in his doctorate program, but he had been having a crisis of faith and had been considering switching to astrophysics. 

He really should have switched to astrophysics. Or, actually, considering their current problems, maybe his degree had been for the best. All the fun had gone out of wondering if aliens were real. They were real, and their nutrition rations tasted like cardboard. 

Granted, Gordon liked the taste of cardboard, but that was neither here nor there. For the time being, Alyx had thrown herself into being a teacher’s assistant with the same enthusiasm as she did everything: with a very large gun and her giant robot dog. 

The days spun by, and every day Gordon woke up in the same bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering if this would be it. If this would be the day that he would see the man in the suit from the corner of his vision and that would be it. No more teaching, no more Alyx, no more Barney. 

He kind of wanted it. This world was exhausting and confusing, and he didn’t belong. There was nothing to fight or kill, and he didn't know what he was good for besides that. It made more sense to go back to what he was good at. That was just logical. 

Finally, Gordon woke up and stared at his increasingly familiar ceiling, and realized it was the first day of class. 

When he entered the kitchen, yawning and rubbing his bare chest, he was surprised to see Barney cooking in the kitchen. Eggs, too - fresh eggs, not freeze dried or anything. Granted, the shells were clearly - uh, green, and kind of speckled, and Gordon somehow really doubted those were chicken eggs -

“Good morning,” Barney said one-handedly, stirring the eggs with one hand. He was already in his armored suit, ready for work. “Sit down, there’s already toast on the table. Don’t ask what the jam is made from, but we’re all pretty sure it’s edible.”

Gordon, who had never given a shit in his life if something was edible and wasn’t about to start now, sat down at their ricketytable and methodically ate his toast. It was good - the bread was different from what he was used to, clearly homemade, probably traded from the nice couple across the hallway. The jam was sour and tart, kind of like canned cranberries, but it was good. He ate all of it, thanking Barney as he slid the eggs onto his plate. They tasted...not like eggs, but not bad, either. 

“We’re experimenting with alternate food sources,” Barney said. He had thick bags under his eyes, and he frequently stopped to sip from his energy drink. “Chickens and most domesticated farmyard animals are extinct, but we think a lot of the stupider aliens can be domesticated. A lot of the land was already terraformed to support husbandry of the alien species that the Combine ate and fed us, so why fix what isn’t broken. Headcrab eggs are actually very sustainable and easy -”

“That’s enough of that,” Gordon said calmly. “What’s the special occasion?” 

The food couldn’t have been cheap, and it was always rare to eat something other than ration bars. But Barney just shrugged uncomfortably, going back to the rusty stove. “First day of school. Big day for you and Alyx. I packed lunches -” he gestured at the countertop, which had two neat rectangular containers stacked on top of each other bound with string, “ -and took the morning off. I also packed your briefcase, since you didn’t bother last night. It has your lesson plan, your tests, some extra water in case you get thirsty, and Alyx’s fidget toys because she’s going to forget that hers are in her pockets. Do you have your tablet?”

Gordon, with his hands full of fork and egg, mumbled something about how he didn’t like the tablet. 

“Use the AAC device, it’s cutting edge technology that would have saved us a lot of headache in 1997,” Barney said severely, holding the spatula in one hand and waving it around sharply as he spoke. 

Gordon grimaced.

“I don’t care if you don’t like it! You just hate having to pretend to pay attention to people!” Barney sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Go wake up Alyx, she’s going to be late at this rate.”

Reluctantly, Gordon shook Alyx awake, gently prying her away from the five hundred pillows she slept with and promptly used to assault him for waking her up. It was another twenty minutes before Gordon was dressed - t-shirt and jeans, suits were the tool of the capitalist Man - and Alyx had dragged on a hoodie and jeans. She was the most awake out of all of them, excitedly shoveling eggs into her mouth and saying something verbally to Barney, who was replying both strictly and heatedly. 

Gordon, who had reluctantly fished his screen out from under the pile of laundry where he had stashed it, slowly slid it into his lap and glanced down at it booting up. Soon enough, text was scrolling across the screen. Maybe this thing  _ was  _ handy. 

“ - and he’s going to refuse to use the screen again, so remember the actual ASL I taught you.”

“Chief and I’ve been talking for a month, my sign is great!” Alyx protested, sipping her cold rich breakfast tea that both she and Barney had a taste for. “Come on, I never forget anything you teach me. You’re the one who kept on saying it was important.”

“Speaking and translating are two very different skills. And you’re the one who kept complaining about it,” Barney said. It was impossible to read tone through the screen - yet  _ another  _ reason why it wasn’t as great as Eli kept on bragging that it was - and English was a bizarre language where nobody made any facial expression at all, but Gordon had the sense that Barney was almost teasing her. “You kept on skipping out on language lessons to go invent your own programming language. Which isn’t what I was trying to teach you.”

“I learned what was important,” Alyx said, face set in stubbornness. “I learned how to shoot a gun alright, didn’t I?”

Barney’s face creased in a smile. “You did.”

“And throw a grenade, and make and defuse a bomb,” Alyx pressed. “I learned how to code and reprogram and hide and scavenge. I can do all of it. You taught me how to run, remember? Lean forward, drive your knees, keep your heels up, swing your arms.”

“Remember to breathe. I haven’t forgotten.” Barney’s eyes were strangely distant, almost far away. “You kept on trying to keep up with me. You used to cry when you couldn’t.”

“This is what I’m talking about, U - Barney. I’m not that little kid anymore! Why can’t you trust me?”

“I do,” Barney said. “I trust you with my life, Alyx. But I’m trusting you with Dr. Freeman here, okay? And that’s a lot more than my life.”

They fell silent after that, and Gordon hurriedly switched the screen off and asked Barney for seconds. 

  
  
  


The “school”, such as it was, was in a small building that had obviously been rapidly cleared out. Gordon guessed it had been an office building for the Combine, judging by the very high ceilings and very wide hallways. Part of the reason why they had chosen Paris - sorry, City 11 - sorry, New Paris - as the Resistance headquarters was because it had also been an administrative hub of the Combine, along with Chicago, Johannesburg, and Moscow. Most administrative buildings were being repurposed for Resistance use and the factories to build alien weapons with materials that they no longer had access to were shut down and stripped. Factories that built things that could be used to help supply and arm humanity were kept open, except Gordon assumed that people were getting compensated for their labor and were entitled to what they created these days. Socialism had gotten popular while he was gone. 

It was nicer than he had been expecting. Most of him had been expecting a church basement or someone’s house (Churches, of course, were the first public buildings to be destroyed, next to libraries, but they were also the first new buildings that humans raised). Instead it was a whole building, just for humanity’s first school. There was even a sign - NEW PARIS COMMUNITY EDUCATION. 

They had taken the streetcar over, sitting awkwardly to each other. Gordon looked out the window as Alyx cleaned one of her guns in her lap, eyes distant. The other denizens of New Paris slept in their seats or quietly read mass produced leaflets and newspapers, if they were older. Books were harder to find, but underground printing presses had been churning out revolutionary material for twenty years. Nowadays they just put out the news. It was reassuringly normal. 

Alyx tapped him on the shoulder, her gun reassembled and sparkling clean on her lap. “Gordon? How did you and Barney meet?”

Uh. Gordon struggled to remember. “What did he say? I’m sure he’s told you.”

“He has,” Alyx said, face uncharacteristically blank, “but I’m interested in your version.”

How had he and Barney met? He barely even remembered. There was a life pre-Black Mesa, and a life during Black Mesa, and Barney was part of it. He was as wrapped up into every memory of the place as his employee ID and his HEV suit. 

Well. Most memories. 

“He had been...working the security desk, I think,” Gordon said slowly. “Doing that thing where he chats with everyone who walks through the door. Talks about the game or...I don’t know what he talked about. My first week there, he tried it on me, and I was thinking...like, I really don’t want to talk to this guy. He seemed super annoying. So I did what I usually do and just shook my head, pointed to my ears, pulled out that notebook that told people I was Deaf, the whole thing. Just to get him to go away. And you know what he said?”

Alyx shook her head, eyes wide. 

Gordon couldn’t help but smile a little at the memory. “In perfect ASL, he immediately tells me, ‘Hey, my Grandma’s Deaf! I bet she can drink you under the table.’ Then he never stopped bothering me for, uh, many years.” Gordon shifted somewhat uncomfortably in his seat. “I bet he tells it differently. I’d forget about that, his story’s probably better.”

“Actually,” Alyx said, eyes somehow even wider, “that’s  _ exactly  _ as he tells it.”

Huh. 

“But you forgot the part where you freed the kidnapped headcrabs from cruel experimentation and won them over with the power of friendship,” Alyx said excitedly, throwing in the pidgin sign for ‘alien-friend’ and ‘Gordon Freeman rescues everybody again’, which was apparently a basic piece of the lingo. “Oh, and the part where you got kidnapped by the Black Mesa Secret Ops team and tortured into giving up your comrades, but you never talked! Then they blackmailed you into working for them, and you went along with it for a while so you could get the dirt on them, but on the day of your grand escape attempt Wallace Breen activated the resonance cascade -”

Gordon lightly chopped through her sign for the resonance cascade, which was just ‘alien doom‘ stitched together, and her nickname for Breen was too impolite to be named. “Barney didn’t tell you any of that, did he?” Gordon asked archly. 

Alyx deflated. “On second thought, I think Jose did when we were eleven.”

“There you go.”

But, despite the bizarre conversations, some part of it was reassuringly normal. Taking public transport to work, walking into a building built by malicious entities that reeked of evil, and doing menial tasks. It was all very much like his regular life. This ought to be comforting.

Somehow, Gordon felt as if it would have been more comforting freeing yet another civilization from an evil empire. At least he didn’t have to worry about social interaction when he was killing everything that moved. 

They ran into a receptionist, whose eyes got incredibly big when she saw Gordon, and she quickly passed them off to a harried looking woman. She was dressed practically, like most people these days, in sneakers and a hoodie and clutching a clipboard. She wore a nametag - ‘SOFIA, Director’ - and a harried expression. Alyx straightened instinctively when she saw her, and Gordon slouched rebelliously. 

The first, and for several months only, thing Gordon and Barney had agreed upon in their early acquaintanceship was mutual disrespect and dislike of authority. Ironic, now, but Gordon couldn’t help it. He had been a college student in the ‘90s. It was built into his DNA. 

Sofia said something, and judging from her lips it was probably a greeting and his name. She saluted snappily and Gordon lazily saluted back as Alyx easily shot off a crisp salute too. Sofia said something further and paused, letting Alyx translate. 

“Thank you so much for agreeing to lead this class on such short notice,” Sofia said, as translated with slight difficulty by Alyx. “Your classroom is right down the hall. You asked for the youth class, correct?”

Gordon nodded, and Sofia turned on her heel sharply and began striding down the hall. Gordon had to speed-walk to keep up with her, and they twisted and turned down several identical hallways until they finally came to a stop in front of a cheap white door identical to every other one. The label read 294, and Sofie unlocked it with a physical key before tossing the key to him and opening the door to let them both in. 

“I’m afraid I can’t stay long,” Sofia continued, the lines around her eyes drawn tight. “Please let us know if you need an additional translator, or if you’re experiencing behavioral problems with the kids. This will be the first time for most of them in a traditional classroom, so just remember to set your expectations low. There’s also going to be some special needs students, which I was hoping to speak to you about -” As Alyx struggled to keep up she looked down at her watch, frowning into it and scrolling through the screen interface. “I have to go, I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything later. Good luck, Dr. Freeman, Ms. Vance.”

And just like that, she was shooting off down the hallway like a bullet from a gun, and Gordon and Alyx were left alone in the classroom. 

It was just a large, empty room. Not auditorium style or staggered like a college classroom, or decorated like an elementary school classroom. Instead, it had two rolling whiteboards pushed to the front, a podium, an overhead projector hooked up to an outlet, and several rows of old desks pushed into unsteady rows. There was a teacher’s desk at the front, with an additional chair pulled up for Alyx. 

“Well,” Gordon announced to the empty room, thumping his overly heavy briefcase down on the desk and walking over to the podium next to it. “This is going to go great.”

“At least it’s less dangerous than shooting bugs and fash,” Alyx said diplomatically, before betraying herself by hesitating. “Right?”

“Sure.” Gordon paused a beat. “Right?”

They stared at each other. 

“I miss Barney,” Alyx said mournfully. “Do you think he misses us?”

“He’s too busy being president, Alyx.”

“What’s that word?” Alyx asked. Gordon fingerspelled it for her. “Sorry, man, you’re using outdated lingo again.” She flashed the pidgin word for ‘extinct’ and the particular sign that Gordon was half-sure was some kind of derogatory term for people around the age of fifty to seventy. 

“You know,” Gordon said, half-amused and half-exasperated, “one of these days we’re really going to have to find out who’s the weird one, me or you.”

Alyx stuck out her tongue, flashing a word at him that Gordon was pretty sure was calling him ‘normal’, but somehow insultingly. Gordon was spending far more of his time trying to parse young adult slang than he ever wanted. 

“I’m not the one who was freeze dried for the last twenty years,” Alyx said snottily. “I’m a very average, normal twenty four year old woman.”

“You started shooting aliens when you were eight,” Gordon pointed out, eyebrow twitching. “That’s not exactly normal.”

“Resistance born and raised,” Alyx said proudly. “What, did girls where you’re from not know how to headshot a cop from a hundred yards?”

“Alyx, terrible news about how often people used to murder police officers -”

But Alyx stiffened, and she turned to face the door to the room. It was open, and a short Asian girl with her hair chopped in a short bob was poking her head through the doorway. She looked nervous, wearing a hoodie and a backpack, looking anxiously around the room as if she was wondering if it was the right place or not. When her eyes landed on Gordon, she froze in fear. 

Alyx called something, waving her in, and directed her to a seat. As Alyx walked over to the door to prop it open with a small brick, winking reassuringly at Gordon, Gordon found himself opening his briefcase and taking out his teaching materials. He found a dry-erase marker on the tray attached to the whiteboard, and slowly uncapped it. The smell of dry erase markers hit him, so familiar and yet so foreign, bringing back memories of thousands of days in a classroom. 

When he glanced backwards, he saw the girl sitting in the front row. Her posture was stiff, her eyes wide, and she was meticulously arranging a small pile of loose printer paper and a stunted pencil in front of her. She folded her hands in front of her, a caricature of a perfect student, but her right leg bounced nervously. Her hoodie bulged with concealed weaponry. 

She wanted to be at school. She chose to be here. And it would be downright insulting for Gordon not to make it worth her time. 

More and more kids in, nervously whispering to each other behind cupped hands. The youngest of them was twenty, and the less than a decade older than Alyx. Gordon saw a few men who had to be his age, or even a few years older. The youngest generation. Every single one of them was badly concealing nervousness, clustering at the corners and in the back of the room, and they all stared with wide-eyed disbelief at him. 

Gordon turned back around, back of his neck prickling with the attention of so many wide-eyed people, and carefully wrote on the board in very large letters. 

  1. FREEMAN. INTRODUCTION TO MATH. 



He turned around, capping his marker, and saw Alyx gently closing the door. Every chair was full, every eye trained on him. Alyx nodded at him, smiling thinly, and moved to stand a few feet away from him. 

Okay. Class was in session. 

“Okay,” Gordon signed out, as much to himself as it was to everyone else. He saw, from the corner of his vision, Alyx repeating what he was saying in English. “How many of you know sign?”

After a minute for Alyx to finish translating, all of the students sat with wide eyes. 

Right. Never been in a classroom before. “Raise your hands, please.”

Slowly, about a fourth of the room raised their hands. Way more than would have been the case in 1997, but maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise. 

“Okay,” Gordon began again, “how many of you know the pidgin?”

This time, almost everybody raised their hands. 

Great. Gordon concentrated, and made a conscious effort to switch as many words as possible from the language he and Barney were familiar with into the language that the kids were familiar with. The pidgin was meant to be a supplement to the spoken language, not a complete replacement, but the vocabulary was so large that it was more than possible to try to mash it together with ASL into something understandable. Maybe that was the way of it. Maybe any understanding formed between Gordon and this new world would be indirect, lopsided, and sodden in compromise. “I’ll try to speak like this, then. Alright.” He took a deep breath, in and out, and reminded himself that this was not the scariest thing he had ever done. Not by a long shot. “My name’s Dr. Gordon Freeman. I’ll be your teacher for the next three months. I’m Deaf, so my assistant Alyx Vance is going to be translating for us in this class. Uh, yeah, this is also Alyx Vance, and she’s going to be your teacher’s assistant for the semester.” 

He paused a second, collecting his thoughts. “I know that this is the first time most of you have been in a classroom. There is a, uh, certain etiquette. A way things are done. Tests, quizzes, grades, that kind of thing.” He was forced to use ASL for most of this, as there was just no word for it in the pidgin. Why would there be? “Raise your hand when you want to talk, and don’t just call stuff out - but if you call something out I won’t notice, anyway. Don’t be disruptive to other students, and try not to talk unless you have permission. I mean, I won’t notice, but if you’re too disruptive then Alyx is going to throw you out.” He faltered, uncertain. “But, you know...there’s a lot of rules to school. And I don’t really care about most of them. Those rules were for a different time. And we’re in the time we are now. So we’re going to...reinvent some stuff. I hope that’s okay with you. Just don’t be a dick to the other students, and don’t be a dick to me and Alyx. And do your best. Ask for help. That’s all I want.”

He stopped talking, letting Alyx catch up, and took a deep breath. He walked over to the stack of papers on the teacher’s desk and passed them to Alyx. “This is something called a test. There’s questions, and I want you to try to answer them as correctly as possible. It’s something called an assessment, which means that it’s just me trying to figure out how much math you guys know before I begin teaching you math. Okay, you have...uh, until you all are done. Go wild.”

That was the most speaking he had probably done in...either several months or twenty years. Gordon sat down, psychologically exhausted, as Alyx passed the tests out. 

The dumb little AAC screen on his gauntlet was on, although it couldn’t catch any of the quiet conversations happening between the students. Gordon pulled out one of Eli’s more recent papers and started reading it as the students began attacking the test with a ferocity of concentration. He tuned them out, focusing on the paper, and was only startled from his reverie when Alyx tapped him on the shoulder. 

“I forgot my fidget toys.”

Gordon silently handed her the ones from his briefcase. 

“Thanks!” Alyx paused a second. “Can you remind me about something?” At Gordon’s grunt, she continued. “Are they supposed to help each other with tests? I can’t remember.”

Great. Gordon kneaded his forehead. He glanced around the room, already seeing several small pockets of students trying to figure out the test together. “No, tests are taken individually. Please clarify this.”

“Got it!” Alyx shouted for attention, and Gordon glanced down at his screen to read her verbal words. “Everyone stop working together! That’s not doing it right!” 

“Why can’t we work together?” Another student called out. 

“I don’t know, that’s just how it works! Stop arguing!”

This was going so great. 

After thirty minutes - a criminally short test, especially for an assessment, but Gordon figured that nobody probably had the stamina for a two hour one - Alyx gathered up the papers, and Gordon stood back up. He surveyed the classroom, quickly counting them out. Couldn’t be more than twenty. 

“Okay,” Gordon said. “How did we find the tests?”

A student called out something, and Alyx quickly translated for him. “It was really easy and really hard!”

Somehow Gordon had the feeling nobody was going to get the hang of raising their hands. “It covered elementary school to high school math,” Gordon answered, “so some of it should have been doable and some of it should have been hard.”

“I didn’t understand the words,” another student said, distressed. “What’s a formula?”

“When are you going to teach us science?” another student asked impatiently. “I want to learn how to kill bugs with science, like you did!”

“I killed aliens with crowbars and blunt force trauma,” Gordon said flatly. 

“Crowbars are science, aren’t they?” the first student piped up. “Right?”

“It wasn’t on the test, though,” her friend said to her, and then conversation picked up so quickly that Alyx gave up on translating for favor of trying to get them to quiet down. 

Finally, Gordon sharply rapped on the table, and the sound must have been loud because the room quieted down immediately. “If you’re going to speak without raising your hand, do it one at a time. Why don’t we move onto introductions, then?” Several people raised their hands. Gordon ignored them. It had been a rhetorical question. He pointed at the girl in the far right of the first row - the first girl who had walked in, who apparently hadn’t lost any of her anxiety. “You start. Name, age, hometown, and - uh, job? And...fun fact.”

Several hands went up immediately after Alyx finished translating this. She glanced at him. “They want to know what constitutes a fun fact.”

“Ignore the fun fact.” Gordon pinched the bridge of his nose. “Give me a hobby. What you do for fun.” He nodded at the girl, who now looked petrified. “Go ahead.”

“My name’s Klaudia Park,” Klaudia said, verbally speaking a bit but more heavily reliant on the pidgin than most. “I’m twenty two. I was born in City 20 and was moved to City 17 when I was...fifteen? I work in a factory. I enjoy...eating?”

At least, that was Gordon’s translation. Directly, it was more like ‘Klaudia Park - kid - City 20 - relocate - City 17 - manufacture - yum!’. But when Gordon signed back ‘nice to meet you’ in the pidgin sign too, her face lit up, and Gordon couldn’t help the smile. He nodded at the boy next to her, much taller and much older. When he spoke it was mostly verbal with some sign thrown in for emphasis- probably less comfortable with the sign.

“Jakob Schmidt. Twenty seven, from Frankfurt.” When Alyx translated, she gave an edge of proudness and defiance to the signed word, newly legal. “I’m a soldier and I enjoy snowboarding.”

“Does snow still exist?” Gordon asked, fascinated. 

Jakob smiled, yellow and crooked teeth flashing. “Oh, yes. But you have to go to Norway. Strap some wood or metal to your feet and fly down the mountain that way. Fun little sport.”

The rest of the introductions progressed like that: twenty five, twenty three, twenty, twenty eight, twenty one. Factory worker, agricultural worker, soldier, agricultural worker, factory worker, soldier. Liked to eat, play sports, play games, eat, play sports, hang out with older cousins, shoot guns, kill fash, kill fash, kill fash. Everybody was most comfortable with the combination of speech and sign, but some restricted themselves to sign in seeming deference to Gordon. One girl, Emily-twenty-liked metalworking, spoke entirely in BSL and let Alyx translate for her. She didn’t seem to have a tongue. Another two students, Adam-and-Gabriel-liked-eating-and-football, were missing a leg and an arm, respectively. Other students were too shy to say anything at all, and they skipped over introductions. Another student had to leave class halfway through, seemingly overwhelmed with the sound and amount of people. 

The last two students to introduce themselves sat in the back of the classroom. Two young men, apparently a little younger than Alyx, both sandy blonde. One’s expression was defensive and closed off, while the other’s expression was absent and distant. His mouth was slightly open. When it came turn for the ferocious looking boy, he set his mouth firmly and spoke entirely verbally, letting Alyx translate. 

“Simon Gardner, and this is my twin brother Kevin. From City 17. We like football. I’m a soldier and he’s a factory worker..”

He abruptly stopped speaking, content to leave it there, and his brother didn’t say anything. Gordon gave it a minute, in case Kevin Gardner intended on saying anything, before continuing. 

He was ready to say some lame wrap-up when he saw Gabriel pretend to cough, gesturing out a sign unfamiliar to him. Next to him, Adam signed out the same thing, more blatantly. Other students did the same thing. Others were sneering. Some others crossed themselves, and those sitting close to Simon and Kevin made a show of moving their desks further away. 

Whoever these boys were, they were anathema. The only context Gordon received was from one girl, who had been so shy she couldn’t introduce herself, signing out a pidgin that had been one of the first he had learned. One of the most common and ubiquitous, more of a slogan of the rebellion than a collection of words: one pointer finger drawing a line across her throat. Death to fascists. 

Enough of that. Gordon knocked against the table again, sending all hands flying back to lying respectfully on the table. “It’s nice to meet all of you,” Gordon said firmly. “My name’s Dr. Gordon Freeman. I’m...I’m older than you. My job is...this, I suppose. I enjoy…” Gordon trailed off. He couldn’t even answer his own icebreaker question. Jesus. “...polishing my guns.”

Everybody stared at him expectantly. Waiting, wanting, needing. What had they been expecting? War stories, Schwarzenneger? He couldn’t be that. He could only be this. Was it enough?

“Our hour’s almost up,” Gordon said lamely. “I’ll see you all here, at this time, next week.” Everybody worked full-time, and the concept of a day off was a new one to these kids. They could only hold classes once a week, on Sunday, when it was illegal under new laws to make them work. “Thank you all for attending. I’ll see you next week. You’re dismissed.”

And that was it. The kids nodded at him respectfully before promptly gathering their things and filtering out the door. Gordon stood at the podium, pretending to be sorting through papers, waiting for the students to file out and leave. 

When he looked up, everybody was gone, save for three students: Klaudia, anxiously playing with her fingers, and Kevin and Simon in the back. Simon’s face was impassive and stony, but his eyes kept flickering to Klaudia. 

When Gordon looked over at Alyx, she just seemed thoughtful. Finally, she seemed to reach a decision, and she called something to the brothers. She jerked her thumb at the door, signing out the pidgin for ‘escort mission’, and Simon frantically nodded. He pulled his brother up and gently shepherded him out the door, Alyx close on their heels. She flashed a thumbs-up at Gordon, which did nothing to ease his confusion but reassured him that she probably had a handle on the situation. 

Finally, he was left in the room with Klaudia. She stared at him, eyes wide. He pointed at the door, expression blank. 

After a second more of staring at each other, Gordon gave up and flicked on his screen. He extended the keyboard and typed one handed into it, letting the little robotic voice read out his words. The little robotic voice that he  _ fucking hated _ . 

“Do you need something?”

“Oh. Uh.” Klaudia blushed, standing up abruptly. “No. I’ll go. I was just thinking. I’ll go.”

“Okay.” Gordon nodded, glad that this was over with. “See you next week.”

“Do you remember me?” Klaudia burst out, before blushing bright red and clapping her hands over her mouth. 

Uh. Gordon read the screen blankly before looking at her, also blankly. For a brief, stupid second, Gordon wondered if she had also worked at Black Mesa, before remembering that it was impossible. 

His blank expression must have been descriptive enough, because she cautiously spoke again. “You saved my life.” She signed out the pidgin for ‘Gordon Freeman saves everyone’s lives again’. 

“That really doesn’t narrow it down.”

“I was at the Citadel. I was escaping it with my mother. We -” she stopped and signed the pidgin for ‘my loved one died a hero’, which was a common euphemism for being slaughtered by the Combine. “I was gonna get got too, but you killed it. There was so much blood…” She stopped short again, before speaking again. “I want to be a scientist. That’s why I need to know math. I want to be a scientist for the Resistance. I didn’t know you would be here…”

Gordon stared at her some more, completely unsure how to respond. 

“It’s okay,” she said, “you don’t have to say anything. People who are good with guns don’t have to be good with people, I guess. I’m not too good with a gun. But I’m not good with people either.” She nodded her head shakily. “I have to go. Bye. See you next week.”

She fled, as if the Combine itself was hot on her heels, almost running into Alyx on her way back inside. Alyx watched the girl flee down the hall, eyebrow slightly raised. She turned back to Gordon, shrugging slightly. 

“What was that all about?”

Gordon didn’t really know. But maybe that was the problem. 


	2. Alyx Vance Is A Hero!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for very brief mention of miscarriage.

That night, Barney pulled out the moonshine and announced that they were going to a party.

It was the one drink that not even the Combine had managed to rid humanity of. Mass production of alcohol had come under halt, Wallace Breen had blathered about how it was to preserve humanity’s virtue, and the underground economy of moonshine had cranked into full throttle. People drank now as much as they did pre-war, maybe even more. Barney had alluded that it had been dangerous even during the occupation, but it was one of those things that the cops tended to overlook if you were willing to share. Even the Combine tended to pick their battles. 

Barney didn’t drink very often. It was one of his many changes: Barney pre-war had drunk as much as any young man who had never quite grown out of that combination frat bro and stoner mentality, which was to say they had spent more nights than not at the company pub. They had both drank and smoked and did whatever. Nowadays, Gordon only ever saw Barney drink at public parties, where it would be strange not to drink. 

Parties - block parties, more specifically - were also common. The day after the Combine had retreated from Earth was popularly known as ‘Humanity’s Hangover’. The corpses of aliens that Gordon had left behind had been fried up and served with waterfalls of moonshine, and for almost every human alive it was the largest, greatest party they had all attended. The first party in twenty years, for most of them. 

Ever since then, these neighborhood block parties had become a popular pastime. Everyone brought some food, someone slaughtered an alien and fried it up and served it at a barbecue, and everyone stood around trading swigs of moonshine and easy conversation. In a world with no real television and very little entertainment, it was the favored way to have some special fun. 

Gordon didn’t particularly want to go to a party, but he was assured that he had no choice. Alyx punched the air in excitement when Barney told her, immediately rushing back into her room to throw on her party clothes, and Gordon resentfully strapped his dumb little screen back on his gauntlet. Barney, exasperated, told Gordon that he wasn’t going to  _ make  _ him interact with anyone, but Gordon didn’t trust like that. 

“And if you meet anyone at the party,” Barney told Alyx severely, as she winged her kohl in the apartment mirror, “make  _ sure  _ that you’re responsible.”

“God, whatever,” Alyx said, dabbing the kohl with her finger and rolling her eyes. 

What was his life. Gordon elbowed Barney slightly, turning slightly to make sure that Alyx couldn’t see what he was saying. “She’s twenty four, you know. Do you really have to…?”

But Barney just looked exceptionally pained. “Do you think that  _ anybody  _ has gotten the birds and the bees talk in twenty years?”

“I...haven’t thought about it.”

“We have had,” Barney gritted out, “ _ twenty percent  _ of fertile women in the Resistance get pregnant in the last month.”

“Good for them!” Gordon said, surprised. No wonder there’d been so many baby showers recently. 

“Not good for them! We don’t have the resources for a baby boom right now! And the last thing I want is for Alyx to -” Barney clenched his fists, before exhaling heavily. “Whatever. Most of the women are losing the babies, anyway. I’ve done my due diligence and given her the speech. Her dad gave her the speech too, or, like, his definition of it. Everything else is in God’s hands, I guess.”

On that both strange and depressing note, Barney left to grab the food he was bringing to the party and the moonshine, and Gordon was left fending off Alyx’s attempts to put make-up on him. 

It was sunset, the sun peeking out over the edge of the horizon and brilliantly lighting up the polluted and smoky sky into a beautiful palette of bruised violet and rosy pinks. Orange bands mixed with dark blue stripes of light, and all of the colors bled together to peek out from behind the towering buildings and reflect onto the smoke clouds. Every sunset after the world ended had been beautiful, no matter the situation that Gordon always found himself in when seeing it. 

It reminded him of Xen, the alien planet where the gravity was wrong and the air was sour. The sun never set on Xen, but neither did it rise, always living in a strange twilight with light that seemed to come from within the fragmented world. But Gordon didn’t like thinking about Xen too much, so he brushed the thought away.

He wondered, almost absently, if whatever time and place Gordon found himself in when his contract was used up and he found himself on the next train to nowhere would have a sunset even more beautiful than here and now. There must be beautiful worlds out there, with sights never seen by humans before. Gordon wondered if he would get to see it. He wondered if he would survive it. Or if it would survive him. 

Well, his Mama always told him, ‘don’t worry about a genocide you haven’t commited yet’. He’d burn that bridge when he got to it. 

In the meantime, the courtyard had been transformed into the perfect complex barbecue pit. A large bonfire had been lit, with a few men crouched near smaller campfires cooking strangely colored meat. The benches around the courtyard had been arranged into a circle around the campfire, and there was already a rousing game of soccer starting up near the makeshift field. People, members of the resistance that Gordon saw every day in the halls and in meeting rooms and serving him food, stood around in easy circles chatting and laughing as they clutched cups filled with a pungent liquid. Tall, bright torches had been speared into the ground, not yet lit. 

Gordon saw Eli and Magnusson sitting on one of those benches, arguing fervently between themselves. Uriah stood behind them, looking exasperated, as Dog frolicked near the water cooler. Alyx lit up when she saw them, waving happily at Dog, and the large machine bowled her over in excitement. Alyx laughed, her mouth stretched into a huge smile, and scratched it in the cabling as Eli and Magnusson bitched over the roughhousing. 

“Damn,” Barney said next to Gordon, the jug of moonshine stuck under his armpit. “When are those two just going to get married?”

Gordon looked at him in surprise. Other partygoers had noticed the entrance of the three most high profile members of the rebellion, and had smiled or waved or signed sloppy hellos. But Barney’s eyes were locked on Eli and Magnusson. Eli’s hands were in the air, exasperated with every cell of his body. Barney was smiling faintly, strangely fond. 

“That’s a joke, right?” 

“I forgot that about you,” Barney said, almost randomly. “How self-absorbed you were.” At Gordon’s shocked face, he quickly said, “Not in a bad way. Just in a...Gordon worries about Gordon and nobody else besides Gordon kind of way. For, like, the first five months we knew each other, I was pretty convinced that you didn’t even know my name.”

“It had been six, actually,” Gordon said apologetically. 

“Right. You just...worry about you.” Barney looked consideringly at his jug of moonshine before snapping his fingers, summoning a random resistance member. He said something to them as he passed them the jug and they ran off. “Sometimes I think that’s why you made it out of Black Mesa. You just...worry about the problem in front of you. I’m not like that at all. I’m always worrying about everything all at once. It made me indecisive. I never even picked a fucking major, because I couldn’t stop thinking about all of the what-ifs and worst case scenarios.” The resistance member ran back, without the jug but with two full cups, and Barney took it from him with a nod. He passed the other cup to Gordon, who held it awkwardly. When Barney continued signing, it was somewhat clumsier and one-handed, mindful of the cup. “I always figured it was something about me that sucked. But my tendency to always look at the big picture is useful for leading and organizing. Isn’t that weird?”

“...what does this have to do with Eli and Magnusson?”

Barney blinked at him, almost surprised, before barking a laugh and taking a long drag of his moonshine. “Nothing. Nothing, I guess. I guess all I’m saying is that sometimes you don’t always get the full picture, Gordon.”

“Wait,” Gordon said, struggling to keep up, “are you saying Eli and Magnusson are...uh, like Ellen Degeneres?”

For a long minute Barney just stared at him, face blank. Gordon couldn’t read his expression at all, which unsettled him. Barney was an open book. Right?

Finally, Barney seemed to remember that Gordon wasn’t a mind reader. “Eli’s wife died twenty years ago.” He took another sip of his drink, almost desperately. “I kept telling him to move on, let himself be happy, but then he called me a hypocrite. I deserved it, I guess. Sorry, I have to go schmooze. Over there. Bye!”

Then Barney abruptly abandoned him, which was the first time that had ever happened, and Gordon was left standing by himself at a party he had no desire to be in, holding a drink that he didn’t entirely want, in the future. 

He stared up at the sky, searching for stars, picking the patterns and tapestry they made. There had been a thick carpet of stars above Black Mesa, always. He wondered what it meant that he missed it. 

Out of lack of anything else to do, he walked over to Eli and Magnusson’s bench and sat down heavily next to Eli, ignoring their argument. It was quite easy. They always had a blissfully people free bubble in their immediate vicinity, apparently because their yelling was annoying or something, but unless they got seriously loud then Gordon couldn’t tell. They were a great resource for avoiding people. 

Barney’s words drifted through his brain. Ugh. 

He tapped Eli on the shoulder, interrupting him mid-word, and passed him his cup of moonshine. Eli drank it easily, like water, and clapped Gordon on the shoulder in greeting.

“Barney made me feel guilty for being a misanthrope so I’m here to bond with you,” Gordon told him. “Hi, Magnusson.”

“Gordon! Good morning!” Eli said, exhausting his knowledge of sign. He instead patted Gordon on the back again, smiling at him, and trying to pass the cup back. Gordon refused it - not safe to be drunk at any given moment, when you never knew what would happen - and indicated for him to pass it to Magnusson. Eli rolled his eyes, but he did so, and Magnusson huffed as he took a sip. 

When they started speaking again, it was calmer, between sips of moonshine that they passed back and forth. And for the first time, Gordon paid attention. Really paid attention: paid attention to the way that, between shouts, they smiled at each other, how close to each other they sat. Most of Gordon found it weird: they were seriously old dudes, and he  _ knew  _ Eli used to have a wife. Magnusson too, probably. But there they were: two people, after the end, who understood each other better than anyone else. 

It didn’t even seem possible, to understand someone like that. Gordon sure didn’t. He spent most of his time with Alyx, and even then the more he got to know her the more questions he had. The only person he had ever really understood backwards and forwards was Barney, and then the last month had revealed that everything he had ever thought he knew about Barney was wrong. 

Slacker. Lazy. Not overly bright. Cheerful. Gregarious. Friendly. That was Barney. Now he was none of those things, but he was still Barney. There was nobody else he could be. Somehow, Barney Calhoun had deepened, from a shallow impression on Gordon’s life to a pool so deep he could drown in. How can one person hold so many contradictions?

But maybe that was hypocritical. Barney had probably thought that he had Gordon all figured out too. Scientist, steadfast, straight forward. Black Mesa had drilled deeply in the earth of Gordon’s soul, and found a deep well of oil and tar that sprung forth and obliterated everything else. Gordon should have felt like that, deepened or more or whatever, but instead he just felt like less. He felt like only one thing, these days, something that was deeply and inherently a lie. 

Abort. Abort. Thoughts too deep. Maybe Gordon should have taken that alcohol anyway. He could probably kill aliens drunk. He had done most of it high on morphine. Actually, Gordon had done the vast majority of his murdering extremely high on morphine. Maybe he was only capable of murder while on painkillers?

Good enough excuse for him. He quickly filched the moonshine back and drained it, ignoring the surprised looks of Eli and Magnusson. Magnusson said something to him, and Gordon ignored it and held the cup up in the air. Someone took it out of his hands. 

“Use the unique and cutting edge piece of technology I built you or you’re dead to me, Freeman,” Magnusson signed angrily. 

“Did you memorize that?” Gordon asked, impressed. 

“Good morning, Gordon,” Magnusson said, somehow even angrier. 

Gordon sighed and turned on his stupid little screen and extended the keyboard. One handedly, and looking like a complete idiot, Gordon typed out, “I trust your tech as far as I can throw it, Magnusson.”

“And you can throw your speech tablet very far, because it is lightweight, sleek, and convenient!” Magnusson said. “Stop whining, Freeman. What are you even doing here, you hate barbecues.”

“Barney made me,” Gordon said glumly. Not that they could  _ tell _ , because the tablet  _ sucked _ . “Can I ask you two a question?”

“No.” Magnusson stood up, scowling as the cup of moonshine was replaced in Gordon’s hand. “I’m going to go tell that asshole playing Johnny Cash to shut up, he’s annoying.”

“Oh, can you request Folsom Prison Blues?” Eli asked, lighting up. “I always did love that song. Remember when we sung it at company karaoke night, Arne?”

“Of course I do,” Magnusson said gruffly. When Gordon craned his head, he saw that there really was a man sitting on an overturned log, strumming something on a guitar, as people sat around him and clapped and presumably sang. The sound wasn’t loud enough for Gordon to feel, but - somehow, he felt it anyway. “I’ll tell him, but he better be fucking quiet.”

“How did that old song go again?,” Eli said nostalgically, staring into the fire. “I remember the words...I hear that train a coming, it’s roaring round the bend…”

Magnusson huffed, but after a second staring at Eli he pursed his lips. Gordon recognized the motion as whistling, and Eli’s face lit up. “And I ain’t seen the sunshine, since I don’t know when.”

“I’m stuck in Folsom Prison, and time keeps dragging on,” Eli sung, “and I hear that whistle blowing, down to San Antone.”

“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, son -”

“ - always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns!” Eli laughed, clapping his hands, sending reverberations echoing down Gordon’s sternum. “But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

“Now when I hear that lonesome whistle, I hang my head and cry.” Magnusson rolled his eyes again, but his eyes softened when Eli laughed and passed him the beer back. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

It wasn’t real singing. Gordon liked to sing, in his own way, dancing out the words and working in the poetry. But it was a moment shared, a moment where two minds worked exactly as one, lost in fondness for times gone by. 

With Magnusson gone they sat without talking for a second, both men sipping their moonshine. It was rapidly making Gordon’s head swim, stronger than he had expected, and he watched the small teams kick the soccer ball around. Near them, some other people were chasing each other around, playfully tackling each other in games that were now familiar to him. On the far end of the courtyard, some men had set up a small trick shooting range, and there were thin claps that shook Gordon’s chest as they shot cans off a fence. The sun was setting, slow and inexorable, and a woman walked around lighting the torches. 

Gordon opened his mouth, intending on asking Eli if he and Magnusson were really like that, but he found the words dying in this throat. It seemed too much, somehow, too dangerous to put a name to what he had effortlessly taken for granted.

What would it change? They were partners, in whatever way that was important. It wouldn’t change anything. But, somehow, it felt like a barrier that couldn’t be crossed. As if putting words to it was dangerous - as always, lost in translation. 

“What did you want to ask, Gordon?” Eli asked, startling Gordon out of his reverie.

“I was hoping for for relationship advice. With Barney?” Gordon asked, making Eli choke on his moonshine. 

The older scientist coughed, and Gordon sympathetically thumped him on the back. “W - what?”

Gordon shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I was watching you and Magnusson, and I thought you might be able to explain some stuff about me and Barney.”

It just made sense - they were lab partners, and Gordon and Barney were kind of lab partners, in the lab of violence and anti-facism. They had known each other for a really long time, like he and Barney, and Eli obviously knew how to deal with difficult people. He probably had some wise old guy insight into the whole thing. 

But Eli kept coughing, eventually drinking more of the moonshine to make it go away, and he flashed a weak smile at Gordon. “I didn’t know - sure, Gordon, of course. What do you need advice on?”

“I feel like we’ve drifted apart,” Gordon confessed. “I used to understand him, but he’s changed. I guess I’ve changed too, what with the whole messiah thing, but I feel like there’s a lot he’s not telling me. How do I get him to open up?”

Eli pulled a thoughtful face, propping his chin on his hand. “That’s a good question. I still don’t know how to get Arnes to be honest with me. It’s about listening not to just what he says, but what he isn’t saying. What do you think Barney isn’t talking to you about, Gordon?”

“Everything!” Gordon threw his hands up demonstratively before going back to typing. “He’s tired all the time, he’s both overbearing and really hands-off, he nags Alyx and I but he’s also never around. Everytime I try to ask him how he’s feeling he tells me to drop it, and there’s something going on with him and Alyx but they’re keeping it from me. It’s weird.”

“That’s our Barney, alright,” Eli chuckled lightly, and Gordon tried to remember if Eli and Barney knew each other very well at Black Mesa. They certainly knew each other - Barney had been called in as emergency translator more times than was in his job description or legal, and he did his job as a guard, but that never made them friends. “He always keeps who he is locked up tight. Too many years undercover, I think. It’s made him feel as if it’s unsafe for him to share too much of himself with anybody, even people he trusts. I can barely tell you what he’s thinking half the time.” He took a short sip from his drink, eyes locked into the fire, remembering something far away. “How long was that boy undercover with the Overwatch, again? A long time. He’s the one who tipped us off on the intel that they brainwash their soldiers. Give them those memory pills, make them forget every ounce of loyalty they ever had to humanity. Forget their families, forget their names, forget it all. Those ex-soldiers don’t know what to do with themselves now. Hardly the fault of the poor buggers, but they aren’t good for very much. You have one of them in your class, don’t you, Gordon?”

Simon and Kevin flashed through his mind, Kevin’s vacant stare, the open hostility from the other students. “I guess I do.”

“Barney once told me he was jealous of them. To know nothing other than fighting and hurting, and never thinking about the how or why...he said that it must be a simple, beautiful thing.” Eli shook himself, glancing back at Gordon with a wry smile. “He loves Alyx. He’ll never say it, but if you know them it’s clear. But in his mind, it’s just too dangerous to let on that he cares. I hope he accustoms himself to peacetime soon. He’s spent half his life in war.” 

Gordon shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t imagine it.”

“It must be terribly difficult to be a young person in these times, Gordon. Half a life spent in freedom isn’t too long a life at all. I suppose old men like you and me, who still remember the old days, are lucky. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.” Eli looked back at the deep reds and orange of the fire, quiet for a long moment, before stretching his mouth in a hum. “I hear that train a coming, it’s rolling round the bend, and I ain’t seen the sunshine since, I don’t know when…”

Gordon had nothing to say, which was hardly a rare thing. But now, for the first time in a while, it made him feel powerless and useless. To know the right words to heal a wound, to know how to make someone understand what you needed from them, seemed more useful now than any memorized formulas or proficiencies with a bomb. 

For the first time in a very, very long time, Gordon felt very useless. 

He stood up, finishing his drink and teetering slightly. Off his game. Maybe this would be it, the perfect wrong time for the Gman to pick him up. There had to be some other planet out there to liberate, thousands of them. That was easy. Then they could spread tales of the great Gordon Freeman, so powerful, so useless. 

Fuck it. Gordon teetered across the field, putting all of his energy in keeping his steps in line, and quickly found Alyx having an arm wrestling contest with another girl on a table. They were making extended and extremely intense eye contact, and Alyx was smirking in a particular way that made Gordon worry that a side effect of the alien invasion had made everybody on Earth bisexual. 

Not that everyone being bisexual would be bad. The opposite, definitely. Gordon’s definitely wished a few people in his life were bisexual. Actually, when he was younger, he used to wish that he was bisexual pretty frequently. That was a normal thing that everybody did. It would be very cool if everyone was bisexual. 

“Alyx, if you’re bisexual, don’t worry about it at all,” Gordon told her firmly, ignoring the large crowd gathered around her and the other woman, clapping or exchanging bets. “Live your truth.”

She didn’t respond, mostly due to the arm wrestling thing, but she shot him an incredulous look anyway. Gordon watched with interest as the other woman said something with a smirk, and Alyx’s smile widened in response before flexing her considerable triceps and slamming the other girl’s arm down on the table. Alyx hollered, punching the air, and the other woman groaned. Finally, as slips of paper with bets written on them fluttered onto the table, Alyx collected all of them and slipped them in her pocket. She turned to Gordon, ignoring the other girl’s pout. 

“Am I going to get the talk from you too?” Alyx asked, vacating her seat and swapping it with another young man. She made a phone motion at the other girl, mouthing ‘Call Me’, which Gordon wasn’t touching. “Because Barney also seemed to think that, like, literally anyone under the age of forty cares about that stuff.”

“That stuff?”

“You know, like…” Alyx handspelled ‘homophobia’, unfamiliar with the term. “That kind of stuff. Dad kept on trying to give me the ‘what do you do when cops pull you over’ talk when I was a kid, and I was like, what? I’ll play dead and then escape when they’re distracted. Sometimes old people are real hard to understand, you know? We’re all one human race, humanity first, unite against the oppressor, yadda yadda yadda.” She looked pensieve for a second, apparently recalling something half-forgotten. “All I remember about it is asking Barney why he didn’t have a husband when I was six and him spinning one of his yarns about how he’s married to the revolution. Then I asked  _ Dad  _ why he didn’t have a husband and that’s how I found out that my mom was dead.”

There was...so much to parse in that. Gordon didn’t even know where to start. Somehow, what caught his attention was, “You didn’t know you had a mom?”

Alyx shrugged, unbothered. “I thought humans grew from eggs. You know, like headcrabs and vortigaunts. I went through this phase when I was, like, eight, of thinking I was a vortigaunt. Kept on trying to get Uriah to hook me up to the hivemind.” She scowled. “Bastard wouldn’t do it. Dream ruiner.”

Gordon was too drunk for this. He wasn’t even that drunk, more like mildly tipsy, and he was too drunk to think about this. The worst part was how genuinely adorable the mental image was: little Alyx, pleading with the vortigaunts to teach her the secrets of their telepathy. Like most of Alyx’s life, it was both pretty funny and very sad. Maybe like Gordon’s life too, if you took a certain perspective on it. 

But maybe she was onto something, even if she didn’t know it. Alyx had known Barney for almost her entire life. He had helped raise her. Surely if there was one person who knew how to handle him and his strange moods and idiosyncrasies, it was her, right? 

Alyx had known something as basic about the guy as his sexuality for since she was seven. Gordon couldn’t even have been bothered to ask. In retrospect, he had asked Gordon way too many times if he was a Prince fan, but plenty of people were Prince fans. Maybe not these days, but…

“Oh my god, is Prince dead?” Gordon asked, horrified. 

“What? Don’t be silly, of course not.” Alyx’s expression darkened. “He’ll be dead after the Resistance finds his safehouse, the species traitor.”

“Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this,” Gordon recited to himself, the only mantra he had left anymore in this terrible world. “Okay. If Led Zeppelin are species traitors, please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Alyx, I need your help. Top secret mission. Highest importance.” 

She stiffened, immediately focusing in on him in the dark environment. “What is it? What’s wrong? Are the ‘Bine -” 

“No, I need you to help me get Barney to relax.” 

She stared at him for a long minute, almost inscrutable. Finally, she said, “Humanity has tried and failed to make Barney Calhoun relax.” 

“I’m Gordon Freeman,” Gordon said grimly, using the ‘Free Chief’ nickname for himself for the first time. “If I can’t do it, it’s a lost cause.” 

“I don’t believe in lost causes," Alyx informed him cheerfully, her expression splitting into a wide grin. “The best way to get Barney to stop worrying about something is to get him worrying about something else. Like, when I was a teenager, whenever he got mad that I was sneaking out at night to go brain the fash, I would set something on fire.” 

“Alyx, you’re a genius.” 

“Yeah, I know!” They high-fived. Partners in crime. “So what’s the plan, Doc?” 

Gordon snapped his fingers several times in thought, before his eyes drifted to the corner of the courtyard, where the older men chewing resin and the young men showing off to each other were shooting tin cans with pulse rifles. Slowly, then all at once, one of Gordon’s world-famous, well thought out, and always effective plans occurred to him. 

“Alyx,” Gordon said thoughtfully, “you’re about to see how I snuck past an entire squadron of US Marines in Black Mesa while high on morphine.” 

In ecstatic joy, practically bouncing up and down with excitement, Alyx punched the air. ”Hell yeah, don’t fuck with the science team!” 

“I never said that and the science team doesn’t exist." Gordon rolled up his sleeves, his mind sharpening in the familiar patterns, focusing in on his mission with single-minded intention. “Watch and learn.” 

At the end of the day, that was Gordon’s strength: his single-minded focus, his sheer power of will. If Gordon wanted to do something, he did it or died trying. Barriers to his goal – eating, sleeping, food, bullets, alien invasions - were barriers to be hurtled as soon as possible, existing solely to be destroyed. When Gordon had a goal, it was no longer a question of life and death, right or wrong. It was simply a matter of getting whatever was in his way out of his way. 

This made Gordon history’s greatest weapon. It also made him history’s greatest idiot. 

As it turned out, once the cognitive train had left the one-track mind station, you never stopped to wonder if your idea was good or not. Or, say, if he should be doing this at all. Or anything else going on in his life. Like a horse with blinkers, a particularly determined dog chasing after a ball held cunningly behind a back, or a murder machine, Gordon’s tendency towards hyper-focus was helpful in some instances and cripplingly unhealthy, unsustainable, and downright dangerous in others. He was good intentioned at heart, maybe, or at the very least someone one without very many intentions at all, he just occasionally went into a dissociative state and committed atrocities. 

All of this to say: Gordon never once considered that what he was about to do was a bad idea. 

He purposefully staggered his gait, making himself seem far drunker than he really was. He waved at people who smiled and waved at him, shot finger guns at the kids who enthusiastically asked him to kick around a soccer ball with him or play shoot the fascist again, and waved sloppily at a once again bickering Magnusson and Eli. A small cluster of Vortigaunts, huddled together and chugging the moonshine as if it was water, clicked their pincers at him and he nodded at them, making them all erupt into furious vibrating and elbowing each other. 

Alyx, catching on quickly, jogged next to him and verbally greeted everyone they walked past, waving and hollering and in general being very publicly noticeable. Out of the corner of his eye, Gordon saw Barney standing in a circle with some other leaders. Judging from the expression on his face, he was talking shop again. 

Well, not for long. Gordon finally stumbled his way to the small gathering of gunmen, who all unabashedly stopped what they were doing and stared at him with wide eyes behind their sunglasses. One guy’s resin fell from his mouth in shock. Another man, who had been chewing a strip of old plastic, let it fall limp between his teeth. 

The oldest man there, in his late sixties, held a gigantic pulse rifle. 2016 model, with hydrocarbon chassis and energetic cooling, Gordon noted clinically. Solar powered, so the kick would be light, but the gun itself would be heavier. Would have to compensate for the increased weight in the barrel in comparison to the nuclear powered or the gunpowder ones. It was a very nice, showy, and powerful gun, probably the owner’s pride and joy. 

He held out his hand. The old man stared at him, at his hand, and then at his rifle, eyes wide. Gordon snapped his fingers, expression impatient. The man handed the gun over without saying anything, eyes wide. 

“Oh, no, Doc!” Alyx signed exaggeratedly, mouth moving along with her words. “You shouldn’t be shooting Mega XR E1772 Pulse Rifles, military grade, when you’re this drunk!” 

Gordon stumbled a little, making his leg bend strangely and causing him to tilt to the side, before righting himself. He shouldered the gun easily, walking up to the small fence that served as the barrier. About 500 meters away, not too long ranged but not short either. The targets were nothing more than empty, punctured and dented cans lined up on a fence. They wouldn’t be good for much else, so in a world where everything was recycled to death they were being used as target practice. 

“I’m fine,” Gordon signed, purposefully making his signs sloppy and weak. The men around him began moving their lips in concern, although most of them just seemed excited to see the genuine trigger work of Gordon fuckin’ Freeman. They were probably expecting some insane trick shooting. 

Funny, considering that Gordon had shot a gun for the first time a month ago. Still, might as well give the people what they want. 

Alyx said something very loudly, and the nearest group of people turned to look at them with interest. This was it, how the rumor spread. How the mystique grew, how the legend expanded and toppled out of control. It was the first time Gordon had done it for himself. It seemed right to do it for Barney. 

“Watch and learn, folks,” Gordon signed out sloppily, before bringing the gun up, resting it against his shoulder, aiming the scope, breathing in, breathing out, and shooting off ten shots in perfect and quick succession. 

The gun vibrated in his hand, and his ribs and teeth rocked and jittered uncomfortably with the motion. It was loud enough that he could hear it, that distant thunderclap, not uncomfortable but deeply shocking the first time he had heard it. But he was rewarded with the sight of ten cans flying off their perches, spinning in vibrant motion into the night sky as if they were nothing more than stars, before falling into the dewy grass. 

One of the young men’s eyes bugged out of his head, and his lips flapped as he signed out the pidgin for ‘legend’ and ‘death machine’. His friends, standing around him, agreed, their own hands erupting into an echoing flurry of ‘amazing’, ‘machine’, ‘drunk?’, and ‘murderer’. Gordon made a show of blowing on the muzzle of the gun, making the older men around him laugh and clap his back, proud to call Gordon Freeman one of them. 

“Boring!” Alyx decreed, mouth and hands moving. “Do something more exciting, Doc!” 

“Like what?” Gordon asked, amused. She was a wonderful partner in crime, and a great ally to have at his back when mowing down fash, but he was also finding that her improv skills were top notch. “Need something more impressive?” 

Alyx sniffed imperiously. “Anyone can shoot tin cans. Try...uh...” Alyx thought for a second, before perking up. “Shoot a can off my head!” 

The men around them looked around nervously at each other, even as the younger men looked excited. They started clapping, hands encouraging Gordon and Alyx to do it, even as the older men tried to reign them in. 

But Gordon just shrugged, shouldering his rifle. “Sure. Find something you don’t mind me shooting and run over to the five hundred yard mark.” 

“Awesome!” Alyx cheered. “This’ll be so much fun.” She turned to the crowd, grin stretching across her face. “Who wants to take bets?” 

Now the group of people overhearing their conversation were truly drawn in, and their influence spread. Then the people near them, then the people near them, and like a ripple the news of Gordon Freeman spread. It was the first time Gordon had ever spread a rumor about himself, but it was worth it when some of Barney’s compatriots turned their heads to see what he was doing. And Barney, confused, turned his head too. 

Then he must have heard something his friends were saying, or he must have seen Gordon drunkenly pretending to aim a rifle at Alyx, because he suddenly started sprinting as fast as he could across the courtyard. 

One of the men tossed Alyx a more intact can, and she determined with Gordon if it was the right shape. An older guy suggested an apple, but when Alyx asked what an apple was he was forced to retreat in shame. 

Surreptitiously, Gordon indicated for Alyx to come closer as the crowds around them grew, and he angled his body to cover his words. “Am I actually shooting a can off your head?” 

Indignant rage cracked across Alyx’s rage. “Are you calling me a pussy, Doc?” 

“I would never, I’m sorry for even suggesting it.” 

“If I tell you to shoot at me I mean shoot at me!” Alyx scolded. “I know you don’t understand honor or the warrior code, Gordon, but I would be ostracized from everyone around me if I went back on a suicidal dare!” 

“Right.” Gordon felt the need to clarify something. “And you are part of the last generation on Earth, humanity’s last hope for survival into the future, correct?” 

“Yes?” 

“Right, just checking.” Gordon saluted her. “Alyx Vance, you’re a true hero.” 

But she just gave him a confused look. “What do you mean, hero? I'm just me.” 

Maybe the definition of that word had changed too. It must have changed drastically, for Alyx Vance not to be the definition of heroic and kind. But Barney was rapidly advancing on them, moving like the hounds of hell were after him, and they didn’t have much time. Gordon shooed her away, and she started jogging down the field with the can in her hand. What a bro. 

Gordon took up position by the fence, checking the charge of his rifle and making sure it wasn’t jammed. He hadn’t been intending on  _ actually  _ shooting Alyx, but it seemed as if she’s made a commitment to the act, and he’d hate to disappoint her by not almost shooting her in the face. He wasn’t going to miss, so it wasn’t a problem. 

Breathe in, focus on the target – an Alyx standing very still, with a can balanced on her head – breathe out, and - 

Somebody tackled him around the waist, so quickly and effectively he hadn’t even seen them. Gordon abruptly went toppling, only barely managing to keep grip on the gun, and tumbled across the hard-packed dirt with a projectile wrapped around his waist. 

Gordon lifted his fist, instinctually ready to beat the projectile in the neck or gap in their chitin, and he only barely managed to abort the motion when he realized that it had been Barney who tackled him. They tumbled, head over heels, in the dirt, every hard edge of Barney’s armor digging painfully into Gordon’s t-shirt. 

They finally managed to slow their roll into a skid, and eventually into a stop. Unfortunately, due to the angle of their descent, that put Barney lying on top of him, his hands fisted in Gordon’s shirt and his knee pressing down on Gordon’s own. Gordon, for his part, acted on instinct and angled his arm in an almost impossible way to press the muzzle into the back of his neck. 

And, for a second, it wasn’t Barney on top of him at all. It was an alien, a shambling and monstrous thing, that got a lucky jump on him. For a second, Gordon was back there, bleeding out and high on morphine and not feeling much of anything besides raw desperation. His head swam, his vision jumped back and forth, and his finger itched on the trigger. Get rid of it. It’ll hurt you, get rid of it. Get the obstacle out of the way. Kill it - 

But the weight on his chest was warm and familiar. It was soft, even wrapped in hard metal. A hot breath misted on his face, and it was a familiar breath. And when Gordon’s vision focused, he found only a familiar face, mouthing something over and over and over again. 

With both his hands fisted on Gordon’s shirt, Barney couldn’t say anything. Gordon’s vision was too unfocused and fuzzy to read his lips, and they were beyond the range of the torches anyway. There was no way to communicate, even if there was a gross excess of things that had to be said. 

Distantly, Gordon realized that he was still pointing a gun at his friend, and maybe that was why Barney was lying so completely still on him. Carefully, Gordon flipped the safety on the gun, and gently tossed it away until it landed in the dewy grass. 

But Barney didn’t move. He stayed on Gordon, his chest rising and falling with surprising speed against his own, the press of his hands sweaty and slick. Gordon realized for the first time that he must have worried Barney. Which, of course, had been the goal, but he looked more than worried. He looked... 

Gordon couldn’t ask, and Barney couldn’t say. But maybe there was nothing to say. What Gordon had wanted was for Barney to open up, for some kind of explanation for everything about him that he had never understood, but as they lay together in the dark with the wet grass dampening Gordon’s t-shirt that suddenly didn’t seem so important. 

Maybe he had just wanted to share because Gordon didn’t want his friend to suffer alone. Everyone suffered alone, in the end. Everyone fought their battles alone. Gordon most of all. 

Living a life where the battles never stopped, where every step was taken alone, seemed so lonely. Overwhelmingly, awfully, terribly lonely. Living each day as if it could be your last, always ready to pack your bags and move on the minute you caught a glimpse of a white-pale face. 

If Gordon was forced to live like that, then he did it so his friends didn’t have to. Better him than Alyx or Barney, or Eli and Kleiner and Magnusson. Better for him to suffer alone than for others to suffer with him. 

But maybe Barney thought that too. Maybe that was why he kept his distance: a battle fought alone was one with nobody else in danger. It seemed much stupider when he did it, somehow. How was it that Gordon was the savior of mankind but his best friend was the one with a martyr complex? 

There was nothing to say, so Gordon didn’t say anything. He just gently raised his hands in the air, the universal gesture for surrender that he had never made before, and in the dim light he saw Barney’s eyes soften. He didn’t let go of him. He didn’t seem to know why. Gordon didn’t know either, but maybe he had some idea. 

He hugged Barney. Slowly and telegraphed, he let his arms fall across his back. He didn’t pull him in, or do it tightly enough that he couldn’t wriggle out. He just let his arms fall as they would, and felt Barney’s breath gently slow, and gentle. 

Jesus, Gordon thought hysterically, maybe he really was drunker than he thought. When was the last time he had hugged anyone? His mother? No, his entire family had found open displays of emotion gauche. When was the last time...? 

Gordon was a creature who operated on instinct, drive, and mission. Barriers were eliminated, and the goal was obtained. Gordon did not think about it, he did not argue with himself or have doubts. He just did what he needed to do, and he was very good at it. 

So he didn’t think about it. He didn’t have doubts. He just did what felt right, and what he wanted to do. Even if it meant something, even if Gordon was feeling something stir in his chest that was strange and foreign and familiar, he didn’t think about it. He just did it. 

He and Barney lay there, for longer than they should but not as long as they both wanted to, until Alyx found the both of them and promptly laughed herself into a coughing fit. 

She didn’t laugh so much once Barney yelled at both her and Gordon for almost thirty minutes straight, but somehow Gordon got the impression that she found the entire situation funny anyway. Alyx was strange like that. 

Actually, Alyx was strange in plenty of ways. 

Gordon understood her in ways that he had never understood anyone else, and she was comfortable and easy to him in a way that nobody in his life but Barney had ever been. When she was covering his six, it was as good as if he had eyes in the back of his own head. He trusted her, as he trusted Barney, to interpret his words exactly as he meant them. He trusted her to be her, even if she wasn’t a person he could ever truly understand. 

And she wasn’t. How could she be? She had never tasted an apple, never felt clean rain on her face. She had never watched a real television show or felt safe walking down the street. But Alyx was part of his soul - literally, the Vortigaunts had soul bonded them, it had tingled tremendously and Alyx liked making jokes about them being warrior soulmates - and she was deeply familiar to him in a way that few people were. She was somebody who was utterly familiar and understandable to the part of his brain that broke everything down into kill or be killed, into hunt and survival, into resistance, and she was somebody who was utterly incomprehensible to the part of his brain that still belonged to a normal person and that was constantly screaming, just all the time. 

He tried bringing this up to the Vortigaunts, during his medical check-up where the eight foot aliens enthusiastically tried to assure him that they knew so much about human anatomy, honest, but he didn’t quite know how.

“Your mouth is very clean,” the Vortigaunt assured him, as Gordon nervously kicked his heels on the examination/operating/dissection table. There was really only one table. “The most hygenic, speckless mouth any Vortiguant has ever seen. You must be very proud.”

The Vortigaunt’s name was Sammiah, and as the only Vort fluent in ASL he was Gordon’s designated PCP. All Vorts played essential support roles in the resistance - from scientists, to technicians, to janitors, to general practitioners - and thanks to their sharp intelligence and hardiness, they typically tended to have roles that required a great deal of training and specialization. Education, as Barney explained to Gordon recently, was an investment. It was time consuming, expensive, difficult, and frequently illegal. You didn’t train people you expected to die. This is why most younger citizens could barely read, and why most Vortigaunts could be seen strutting around proudly with lab coats. They all insisted on the lab coats, even ones in fields that didn’t need them. Badge of honor. Rumor had gotten around that the Freeman wore lab coats, when he wasn’t wearing a two hundred pound suit of armor.

So far as Gordon could tell, Sammiah’s knowledge of ASL made him some sort of Vort shaman, holder of a precious knowledge, keeper of secrets. He could be frequently seen on his days off giving sermons in ASL to large congregations of Vorts, his two pronged claws distorting his words into near incomprehensibility. Certainly none of the other Vorts understood it. But they all listened respectfully to the sermons they didn’t understand, in hushed and rapturous silence, and when he finished they broke into furious chitters. Gordon wondered what it meant, what secrets could be told to eyes that could not understand, but maybe that was the point of it. Maybe a secret that could be shared was no secret at all. 

At any rate, he could understand Gordon fine, but as the Vort dialect of ASL was...frequently inventive, Alyx stood behind Sammiah in the small, cramped office that served as a makeshift GP room, chewing on the maple candy that Sammiah passed out to well behaving patients and translating. She didn’t seem to mind taking time out of her day to do stuff like this for Gordon. Gordon got the sense that she was bored and restless, but as that had to do with parts of Alyx that had nothing to do with murder he didn’t truly understand it. 

“I had braces as a kid,” Gordon said. 

“Impressive! That must be the secret behind your success.” Sammiah scribbled a note on a piece of paper as Alyx translated . “Are your braces the covert spring from whence your prodigious marksmanship springs forth?”

“They picked up radio signals,” Gordon said, after a second’s thought, deeply impressed with Alyx’s patience in fingerspelling out the ridiculous vocabulary. “So...no?”

“Wonderful! Now, if the Freeman could close one eye and inform me if he can trace the winding patterns of my claw’s trajectory.”

He did so, and watched Alyx from behind Sammiah launch into an impassioned rant. “Doc, if he makes me fingerspell ‘sepulchral’ one more time I am going to beat him over the head with Lamarr, I swear to heaven -”

Sammiah chittered something to her, amused, and Alyx flushed. Sammiah walked Gordon through the cranial nerve tests, testing his coordination - had it always been so good? - and his eyesight - had it always been so keen, catching the slightest glimpse from empty corners? Gordon was faster, stronger, more. It seemed strange, when he felt like so much less. 

“Everything seems to be in order,” Sammiah said finally, making a few notes on his clipboard. He slanted an amused glance at Alyx. “To put it in...simple terms, is your right leg still bothering you?”

Not insurmountably. “No.”

“Your left arm?”

Not so much he couldn’t shoot. “No.”

Sammiah scribbled something further down as Alyx frowned, giving his words a disapproving tint that seemed to be unintentional. “Difficulty sleeping?”

He’s been sleeping, some. “No.”

Alyx frowned deeper - she’d run into him sitting at their rickety kitchen table at three in the morning plenty of times. 

“Are you still having those migraines?”

Damn Barney for even dragging him to the doctor’s to get any of this checked out. “No.”

This seemed to do it. Alyx frowned severely, stepping forward into Sammiah’s line of sight. “He’s lying,” Alyx signed, “about all of it. His limp is getting worse, he’s avoiding using his left arm, he’s up in the middle of the night, and he has migraines all the time.”

“Whose doctor’s appointment is this?” Gordon asked flatly, so flatly that Alyx winced. 

Even Sammiah seemed mildly reproachful, although of which of them Gordon couldn’t tell. “The Vance is correct, but I must remind her that she is attending the exchange of confidential medical information in a capacity as a translator, not as a friend.”

Alyx’s expression tightened. “Liars are a liability,” she signed out in pidgin, with a familiar and easy cadence that spoke of a common idiom. “It’s dangerous to comrades in the field -” her, most of the time, “to hide injuries.”

“Did Mother Hen Barney tell you that?” Gordon asked, with a hard tint of sarcasm. 

“No,” Alyx said, “life did.” She glanced away uncomfortably, aware of her role here, incapable of keeping silent. But that, at least, was something about Alyx that was essential. “Doc, we’re a team. Humanity survives as a whole. You don’t have to project this - this image of being infallible just to keep us strong.”

“What makes you think this is about the Rebellion?” Gordon asked, confused and frustrated. “I just hate people in my business.”

“That’s enough,” Sammiah said, and Alyx reluctantly translated. “Will the Vance wait outside for a few minutes, if she is so kind?”

Without another word, Alyx turned and left, shutting the door securely behind her. 

Gordon sighed and booted up his infernal device, for once glad to avoid eye contact. He looked down at the screen, mostly using it to escape Sammiah’s considering, slow, lazy blinks. 

Vorts didn’t blink naturally. At least, the ones that Gordon had killed or spared twenty years ago didn’t. He wondered if it was a habit, accidentally picked up from humans, or one purposefully chosen to make them feel more at ease. Gordon remembered training himself as a child to blink at regular intervals to make other children stop giving him frightened looks and decided it was probably the latter. 

He sat down on a small rolling chair with small flecks of stuffing escaping the cracked leather opposite Gordon, tapping his pen on his clipboard thoughtfully. “I find it interesting that the man whom I treated for morphine withdrawal only three weeks ago is so hesitant to ask for pain medication.”

Gordon shrugged, deeply and viscerally uncomfortable with this topic of conversation. He hated the word withdrawal. It made him sound like some kind of addict or something. Which he wasn’t. He had never taken any morphine he didn’t need. His body just...failed him, sometimes. Often. 

“Is the fruit I gave you working?”

“Tastes like crap, Doc, but sure,” Gordon joked weakly. It was an alien fruit, harvested from some far-off planet or another. Tasted like dust, but stopped the vomiting and the craving. That was the important thing. 

“A pleasure to hear.” Sammiah tapped his pen on the clipboard again, and Gordon felt the urge to squirm under the slowly blinking gaze. “Can the Freeman describe his pain?”

“It’s not very bad,” Gordon said stiffly. He was aware that his face had stopped emoting as clearly, but the Vort didn’t seem to mind. Their faces weren’t very expressive either, and since it was an active effort on Gordon’s part to make his face have expressions it was almost nice to be able to talk without worrying about human convention and politeness and all of their nonsensical rules. “Just...aches. Stiffness. Loss of motion. Here, here, and here.” He pointed at his shoulders, his knees, and his back. Sammiah scribbled something down again. More hesitantly, Gordon pointed at his stomach and his heart. “But I can still fight.”

“Hmm,” the tablet read out, somewhat stupidly, as Sammiah vibrated. “And your sleep?”

“Restless.”

“With what?”

Gordon shrugged. “Dreams?”

“Dreams of what?”

“...shooting.”

Sammiah wrote that down too. “Does the Freeman feel persistently tired?”

“Yeah.” Gordon tilted his fist. “But I’ve been sleeping bad, so…”

“Even when you sleep well?”

Which wasn’t often, but…”Yeah.”

“Have you had problems focusing?”

Gordon nodded. “Yeah, since I’ve been so tired...and there’s been a lot going on…”

“That’s natural.” Sammiah continued writing. What was so  _ interesting _ ? “Do you feel your sympathetic nervous system triggering frequently?”

Gordon stared at Sammiah blankly, before reading his words on the screen. “What does that mean?”

Samiah chittered, eyes blinking open and closed slowly in some strange fourfold rhythm. “Do you frequently find yourself trying to shoot enemies that are not truly there?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Gordon shrugged. “But they’re usually  _ somewhere _ , so…”

“I understand.” At this, Sammiah put his clipboard aside. He stared at Gordon, unblinkingly, incessantly, and Gordon stared back. Finally, he seemed to decide what to say - or maybe he had just been waiting for the right moment to say it. “The Freeman is very well acquainted with physical wounds.”

Gordon nodded, uncertain of where this was going. 

“Physical wounds often leave scars.” Sammiah reached out a claw and prodded gently at his arm, where a large and ugly bitemark lay that still bothered him in cold weather. “Here…” He moved his claw gently towards Gordon’s forehead, making him cross-eyed. “...and here.”

“...did getting shot give me migraines?”

“Yes,” Sammiah said cheerfully, “in a fashion. But a mental scar is more difficult to treat than a physical one. Some treatments that you have taken for physical scars, such as morphine, may help the mental ones, but not very well or for very long. Sometimes it takes a long time to heal. Sometimes we do not heal. Many Vortigaunts carry deep mental scars. Some of them do not heal, like The Insane Vortigaunt Who Lives In The Tunnels and Speaks Only in Riddles. Some of us live every day with these scars, even when it is hard. Some heal scars by throwing themselves into work and meaning…” the Vort’s eyes flashed to the side, and Gordon thought irrevocably of Barney, “...and others find that it paralyzes them, makes it difficult to think of a future.” Alyx, her strained smile, always listless. “We all have them. Our mind controls our body, and when our mind is hurt our body hurts. Do you understand?”

Gordon chewed over this for a long time. He thought he understood what the Vort was saying, that his body was so broken and damaged that it made him act like a paranoid idiot, but it seemed as if Sammiah was also saying much more than that. What Sammiah was really saying, he didn’t know. Finally, he hesitantly stated, “I’m not crazy.”

“If the Freeman is crazy,” Sammiah said cheerfully, “then the whole world is. And when everyone is crazy, no one is. So I wouldn’t say so.”

“Okay.” Gordon’s chest felt strange. Raw, and scraped clean, and fragile, all at once. “...do you have a fruit for this?”

“As a matter of fact, we do. I will add it to your ration order.” Samiah leaned back in his chair, satisfied. “Now! Are you sexually active?”

Gordon blinked, and for some reason thought of Barney lying on him three nights ago. “No.”

“Are you having any difficulties adjusting to your new libido?” At his blank and panicked stare, Sammiah elucidated. “For the majority of our population, they are having difficulties adjusting to the large difference in sexual drive. I realize that you only experienced the field for a week, so you may have had no ill-effects, but it is a routine question.”

Really? Gordon hadn’t felt any difference in his sex drive, even over the past week. Or ever. He hadn’t known about the field until Eli started making all those awkward jokes. He told Sammiah this, who just nodded and made a note in his file. 

“You’re content with your libido? It’s always been at zero, to be clear?”

Gordon felt a strange pang of shame over this, and quickly stamped it down. “I’m married to my work,” he said, somewhat defensively. “It’s fine.” 

Strangely, yet again, he thought of Barney. Barney, smiling. Those...weird...recruitment posters for the resistance he had seen around. Barney, on top of him. “The no fuck field didn’t turn like...it didn’t…” Gordon snapped his fingers, uncertain of how to phrase it. If he even wanted to. “A lot of people are gay now?”

Sammiah stared at him. “Yes!”

They stared at each other. 

“And any…” Gordon had never been so mortified in his life. “...weird thoughts...aren’t after-effects of the field...right?”

Sammiah stared at him further, before carefully writing something down in his file. “No!”

“Great.”

They stared at each other further. 

“Well,” Sammiah said finally, “that concludes your check-up. Unless there’s anything else you’d like to discuss with me? I should have another client coming in soon.”

“No, this has been great,” Gordon said, throwing on his coat and running out the door, “see you later, bye, have a good day.”

Right outside the door, leaning up against the wall, was Alyx. She was chatting with a familiar young man, and Gordon realized with a start that the young man with bags under his eyes and limp blonde hair was Simon. Next to him was his brother Kevin, eyes gazing distantly someplace else. 

The boys startled when Gordon exited the room, and Alyx glanced backwards at him. In the pidgin, she signed out, “You ready to go?”. Gordon nodded, and Alyx turned back to Simon and said something else to him, clapping him on the shoulder. 

He held the door open for Simon, who gently steered Kevin into the examination room and let the door swung shut after him. Alyx continued staring at the closed door, eyes narrowed and deep in thought, but she shook herself out of her reverie soon and turned to Gordon. 

“Let’s go visit my dad,” Alyx said finally, and Gordon shrugged and followed her. 

They wound through the narrow hallways, nodding or waving at passerby Resistance members, and flattening themselves across the wall when a small procession of armed soldiers in heavy helmets passed them by. They all nodded respectfully at Gordon and Alyx, but there was something glassy and distant in their eyes. 

It wasn’t until they were rising the creaking lift up to the top floor of the towering base that Alyx spoke again. “Sorry about earlier. Sammiah was right, it was inappropriate of me.”

Gordon shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s fine.”

But Alyx just shrewdly glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You always say that.” 

Including a few minutes ago. “It’s always fine.”

“Is it?” The elevator doors slid open, and they both exited and walked further down a familiar route in the hallway. There were no soldiers here: only Vorts in lab coats carrying large pieces of machinery, only exhausted scientists chugging energy drinks. It made Gordon almost nostalgic. 

When Alyx slid open the laboratory door, calling out a greeting, the small team of five scientists didn’t look up. Three men and two women were bent over tables, some of them tinkering with machinery and some of them scribbling out equations. One was writing trajectories on a chalkboard that Gordon recognized as slingshot teleportation diagrams. It looked as if they were calculating the thrust frequency to hook up the New Paris base with the New London one. A flickering television played a brightly colored program with strange three dimensional characters running around. Gordon’s fingers itched for a piece of chalk, but he drifted behind Alyx instead, who was already having a spirited conversation with her father. 

Eli was sitting at a large workbench, working on one of the Resistance’s few computers. It was repurposed Combine tech, deeply different from any computer Gordon had been familiar with with an OS that made his head swim. Eli, who relied on it for his portal calculations, navigated through it with ease. Apparently Gordon’s AAC device was built using the same guts as the Combine computers, which Gordon didn’t know how he felt about. He looked up from his work for Alyx, the sight of his daughter bringing a large grin to his face, and he stood up to hug her and chat with her about his work as she collapsed on a chair in front of the television screen, kicking her heels up on his desk and scattering papers. 

Gordon, for his part, quickly caught Uriah and expressed through his tablet that he was looking for the medical records of a few of his students. 

“For Gordon Freeman reasons,” Gordon assured him.

“Oh, quite naturally!” Uriah’s fanged jaw shook in chitters before beckoning Gordon over to his desk, where an identical computer to Eli’s sat swamped in papers. Uriah sat down on the creaking stool, the desk chairs too small for his limbs, and inserted a single claw into a small device plugged into the USB port. Oh, right - some genius Vort computer engineers had found a way to sync up Vort hive mind telepathy onto a mainframe. Last Gordon had heard, they were working on getting the patent through. “What would you like to know?”

As Gordon read the words on his tablet, it caught the background noise of Alyx’s conversation - she must have been speaking loudly, for it to pick up on her talking from across the room. 

“Holy shit, Dad! Dad, check this out! They’re still playing Captain Combine!” the tablet read out, strange and impartial. 

When Gordon glanced backwards, he saw Alyx throwing her head back in laughter, slapping her knee, as Eli’s mouth tightened in a frown and the tablet began scrolling again. “I always hated you watching those programs. If it hadn’t been more trouble than it was worth smashing that blasted mandatory television…”

“Aw, come on, Dad. It was either this or Breencast. I got bored.”

“It was Breencast,” the tablet read, and Eli looked deeply unhappy, but Gordon tore himself away from the strange scene to turn back to Uriah. 

“I’m looking for the medical records for some of my students,” Gordon typed out on the tablet, waiting a second for the robotic voice to drone out. “Kevin and Simon Gardner.”

The computer screen flashed as Uriah vibraed. “Just to be certain - this is ethical, correct?”

“Yeah, duh.”

“Wonderful.” Uriah blinked as several files sprung up on the screen, and Gordon leaned in over his shoulder to read them. “All of the Freeman’s students were thoroughly background checked and cleared with a Vortigaunt specialist to guarantee that they were not agents against our cause, of course. If I’m remembering correctly, these two were part of a test case to see if ex-Overwatch soldiers could be rehabilitated. I have been assured many humans lost loved ones to Overwatch brainwashing.”

Were some of the cops he killed innocent? Whatever. Gordon scanned the files quickly. Simon had been a member of the resistance since he was sixteen, a loyal and brave soldier who fought in the front lines of the Battle of the Citadel. Exemplary performance in combat and tactics. Stated in several forms that his reason for joining had been the Overwatch’s shanghai of his brother into service. His position as a Resistance member had saved his brother from -

Hm. So  _ that  _ was what they had done with ex-Overwatch and sympathizers. Well, it wasn’t as if they really had any jails…

Modern humanity, so far as Gordon could struggle to understand, was inclined towards beneficence. They were kind to each other, always extending a hand even at risk to their own life. ‘Hero’, ‘brave’, and ‘soldier’ were pidgin words that Gordon frequently saw thrown around with the greatest of respect. The ideal human, so far as Gordon could tell now, was a human who put their lives on the line for humanity, who never considered his own survival more important than the race’s. It meant sharing bread, sharing weapons, and opening homes. Tolerance, empathy, and love towards fellow humans were ideals that every human strove towards. 

It was somewhat ironic that Gordon, who had seen his name thrown around as the ideal human, was a rather piss-poor example of the modern human. He didn’t really care about anyone but himself and two other people, and he had survived this long by only concerning himself with his own survival. Gordon had never done anything heroic, really. Xen, the Resistance, every life he saved...none of it had been a choice. There had never really been a choice. 

“Aw, man, how did the lyrics go, again?” Gordon turned around to see Alyx, lightly spinning in the dilapidated chair, moving her hands in a slight little rhythm for the tune. “Xen! Shushima! Q’ual’trip’a! Homeworld! Vortant! Aaaand Earth! Go Combine! By your powers combined, I am Captain Combine! Captain Combine, he’s a hero, gonna take war down to zero -”

Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Gordon whirled around, ignoring Uriah’s inquisitive look, and snapped his fingers for Alyx’s attention. She stopped singing, spinning around to glance in her chair. “Is that the Captain Planet theme song?”

“No?” Alyx signed, relieving Gordon of the burden of his tablet. “It’s Captain Combine.”

“That’s fucking Captain Planet,” Gordon signed furiously, chopping through the air, “I know the shitty children’s television my friends and I used to watch when high, and that’s Captain Planet!”

“They rebooted it in 2004,” Eli said, and Gorodn read complete exhaustion from his face. “CGI remake sponsored by the CDPE and broadcast on Breencast. They kept airing it even after all the children grew up for...god knows what reason.”

CMPE: or, the Combine Department of Public Education. Gordon saw the logo everywhere. Propaganda department. Gordon shuddered, even as Alyx watched the program with a broad grin on her face. 

“Five kids from all around the world use the power of hard work, industriousness, patriotism, submission, and unity to combine their powers and call the Combine super-soldier Captain Combine to help protect Earth from the evils of humanity,” Alyx signed wistfully. “I liked it way more than the girly Sailor Combine.”

“ _ They ruined Sailor Moon _ ?” Gordon exploded, hands flying, outraged beyond measure. 

“It was the 4kids dub,” Eli said, after a short translation by Alyx, suffering tremendously. “Last program they ever did, the poor bastards.”

“Oh, man, this is the career day episode!” Alyx cried, spinning around completely to face the television and making Gordon walk closer to her so he could see her signs correctly. “This one was so good. The kids have to face down the evil Mister America, the evil capitalist warmonger who wants to sell guns to every child in the world, all while dealing with the life milestone of having their jobs assigned to them by their Community Mentor. They learn about all of the different careers and stuff they can have.”

On the screen, blandly smiling multicultural faces were walking into what looked like a sterile prefab building that resembled a modern warehouse. He watched a young CGI boy with stiff limbs pick up a baby and smile at it, as the camera showed long lines of identical cribs stretching around the room. A daycare. Gordon realized with a start that there must have been daycares, once, even in this world. Children too young to work. None of them seemed to be above six. 

But Alyx was smiling at the scene, expression fond, and Gordon realized that he was seeing another part of her he could never truly understand. “Trevor’s excited to work in the factory, but Jennifer’s scared that it’ll be hard. Richard got to learn about what it will be like to be part of the Overwatch and Walker got to learn about working on a farm. But everything’s okay, because Jennifer learns that factory work isn’t so hard after all.” Alyx’s expression twisted into something strange. “In the end, they call Captain Combine, and he tells them that no matter where they work when they’re big, they’ll be helping the Combine grow and be great, and that’s the best thing a little boy or girl can do. Factory worker, soldier, farmer...those are the three things a little girl can be when she grows up.”

Gordon didn’t say anything. He couldn’t - Alyx wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the screen, expression distant and signs short and choppy, trapped in a fond memory of terror and subjugation. “It’s so stupid. I’m twenty four. I can lead an army and code a robot soldier or make a program that can slice through the strongest firewall. I can do anything I need to. But I don’t know what I want to do...how can I be an adult who doesn’t know what to be when she grows up?”

A portrait of a woman in limbo: the perfect soldier, the ideal human. Kind, empathetic, brave, heroic. Like Barney, she shined in this dim and fogged world and flourished in a way that she never could have twenty years ago. But like Gordon, she didn’t know how to live in this sorry excuse for peace. 

A war, at least, was something that Captain Combine had trained her for. 

Maybe Gordon was lucky. Alyx was facing down the barrel of the rest of her life, at the finite choices spread out in front of her. Gordon wasn’t. He had one job, and when the time was right he would return to it, and that was the best thing a man like him could do. 

They didn’t hang out in Eli’s lab much longer. As usual, whenever Alyx’s mood took a turn for the worse she quickly and efficiently made sure that nobody would know. The downside of this emphasis on the community over the self. Even when she smiled awkwardly at Gordon and made some faint excuses about needing to work out, Gordon pretended that he couldn’t see what she was saying and followed her anyway. Eventually they were both in the gym, both in their workout clothing, awkwardly staring at each other. 

“Uh,” Alyx said, hands twisting awkwardly, “I’m sorry about the thing at the doctor’s. But you normally don’t really care about apologies, and I was hoping to blow off some steam, so…”

Hm. The absolute last thing Gordon wanted was an emotional conversation about feelings. He occasionally handled Barney’s feelings, and that was the max number of feelings he was comfortable with. His eyes flickered towards the large practice mats in the middle of the gym, used for practicing wrestling, sparring, or grappling. He jerked his thumb towards them, raising an eyebrow, and Alyx looked surprised. 

“You sure?”

Gordon shrugged. Why not. 

By unspoken agreement, they played by usual rules. First one who slapped the ground in a yield lost. Dirty tricks acceptable. No weapons. 

Alyx was well-trained, muscular, and deeply practiced in the art of street fighting. Gordon was an out of shape theoretical physicist with more bad limbs than good ones. 

Strangely, Gordon was one of the few people in the Resistance who could beat Alyx in a straight fight. For the same reason that he was the best shot in the Resistance, for the same reason that he had an encyclopedia knowledge of weapons and firearms despite never having even touched one before Black Mesa. 

He was a freak of nature. Statistically speaking, someone had to be. 

They stood on opposite ends of the mat, already drawing a crowd. Alyx made the ‘start’ hand signal, and they warily circled each other, looking for an opening. As always, Alyx made the first move, ducking in under his raised arm and aiming a sharp kick at his bad knee. Gordon absorbed the hit, falling down on the knee, and using the momentum of the fall to grab Alyx by the waist and pin her down to the mat in one smooth motion. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the small crowd that had rapidly assembled make the pidgin version of applause - the hyper-specific, ‘Freeman wins another fight in two seconds again’. 

Gordon poked her in the neck, their signal for asking her if she yielded. But Alyx didn’t slap the floor. She gritted her teeth and kicked out with her back foot, twisting Gordon over and throwing him off her, and then the game was back on. 

They followed the same routine. Circle, grapple, and Gordon would pin her. He could tell she was growing frustrated: that he wouldn’t punch her, kick her, actually fight. Instead he just held her down on the mat - with a foot, with an arm, with a hold - and waited for her to find some way to get free. 

As the fight continued, Alyx grew fiercer. Sloppier. She fought back with more strength than skill, pushing him off instead of aiming or relying on anatomy. Her coiled posture and tense fists spelled anger, disbelief that he was barely fighting, always stalling, always prolonging the fight. Sweat was pouring from both their bodies. 

She lashed out a kick, and Gordon evaded and danced backwards. She advanced and he advanced too, slipping in under her guard and knocking her legs out to lock her down onto the floor yet again in a move commonly used by the Overwatch. Furiously, impulsively, Alyx sank her teeth into his wrist in a bite. 

That stopped the spar immediately, Alyx immediately releasing her teeth and Gordon getting off her, and the crowd boo’d her. Alyx yelled something at them, forcing them to disperse, and Gordon clinically studied his wrist. She had punctured skin, sending droplets of red blood welling up from the punctures. 

They both exited the ring without talking, Alyx running to grab the first aid kit and him sitting down on a bench as he stared at the red mark on his wrist. When she dropped back on the bench in front of him, gigantic toolbox in her lap, she grabbed his wrist and began wrapping it in quick, efficient motions. 

She only spoke once she finished, winding the gauze back up and putting it away. When she did speak, her words were choppy, curt, and brimming with badly concealed anger. “What was that? That match was shit. You were messing with me.”

“You didn’t give up,” Gordon noted clinically, “even after you had clearly lost. Why?”

Alyx flushed in anger. “The match wasn’t over yet. I could still continue.”

“But you couldn’t win,” Gordon pointed out. “Why keep fighting if you’re just going to lose?”

“A struggle’s never futile,” Alyx snapped out in fluid pidgin, repeating a popular Resistance idiom. “I’d never win any fights if I gave up every time it seemed hopeless! I have no choice but to keep trying!”

“Liar,” Gordon signed clearly and empathetically, making Alyx recoil. “There is nothing you hate more than having your choice taken away. Choice is everything to you. Nothing makes you angrier in a fight than when I use holds or pins on you.”

“That’s not -”

“It is, and you know it. You lost your head in that fight. You can’t handle feeling trapped or cornered.” Gordon looked away before forcing his attention back to her. “I’m the same way. But choice is scary too. Too much freedom, or too little...too many obligations or not enough...it’s terrifying no matter what.”

Alyx just stared at him, eyes wide, uncertain of what he was saying. Or maybe just afraid. 

“For what it’s worth, Alyx,” Godon said carefully, thinking about scars no matter where they were, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here either. I’m scared too.”

She stared at him, blinking owlishly, before the tension broke and Alyx broke into laughter. It was almost wheezing, and she clasped him on the shoulder as she doubled over in laughter. Gordon huffed - was his pep talk that bad? He had worked hard on it. 

“We’re quite a pair,” Alyx said finally, body language finally unguarded, “aren’t we?”

“Just so long as we’re a pair,” Gordon said, “then I’m okay with that.”

For however long that lasted. 

When they finally stumbled back into the dorm, exhausted and laughing and sweaty, Barney was at the kitchen table doing paperwork. The stack was almost a foot tall, and Barney looked ninety five percent of the way to snapping at his pencil. He looked up when they entered, forehead creasing in confusion when he saw Gordon and Alyx’s exhausted laughter and eyes widening in alarm when he saw Gordon’s bandaged wrist. 

They hadn’t been avoiding each other since the block party a few nights ago, but something had changed in a strange way that neither of them knew what to do with. Gordon almost didn’t want to find out, in case he would have to confront it. 

“Barney!” Gordon announced happily. “I have officially parented!”

“Congratulations!” Barney said, mimicking his sweeping gestures sarcastically. “You have achieved the bare minimum of being an adult.”

“You’re three years older than me,” Alyx accused, “You’re more of a weird uncle than anything else.”

“I thought I was your weird uncle,” Barney said, offended. 

“You’re more like the mom,” Gordon said, with a straight face, making Barney turn beet red and hide his face. 

“Stop reminding me I’m almost fifty. Just stop doing it. Don’t do it again.” Barney thumped his head on the table, glaring balefully at Gordon. “Especially you, Doc.”

“You don’t look a day over thirty,” Gordon swore, making Barney flush and look away, unreasonably pleased. Then Gordon had to look away, feeling strange, and conversation came to a necessary halt as Alyx looked between the two of them, exasperated. 

“You two are impossible,” Alyx declared haughtily. “Just like Sailor Combine and Tuxedo Helmet.”

With that confusing sentence that left Barney’s face flushed deep red and Gordon deeply off-center, Alyx flounced off to her room and shut the door. In a few seconds they heard her shower going, and Gordon was left to awkwardly stand in front of the kitchen table as Barney twirled his pen in his hands, eyes trained on the paperwork but hardly focused. 

What wounds did Barney have, that he hid so well? It was hardly a question at all. When Gordon haunted the kitchen table at three in the morning more often than not Barney was there too, and his eyes were as shadowed and haunted as Gordon’s own. If Alyx was somebody who he only understood in the context of a spar, of survival, then Barney was someone who should have been understandable backwards and forwards, before the war and after. 

But he wasn’t, not really. For all Gordon only understood half of Alyx, he didn’t understand Barney at all. 

Did it matter? Most of the time Gordon would say no, it didn’t. At the end of the day, Gordon didn’t care about anybody but himself. 

He never had, not in the world where theoretical physicists didn’t shoot submachine guns and aliens were a fantasy. In a world where the greatest thing a man could be was independent, in a world steeped in capitalism and devoid of folk heroes in radiation suits, in a world where Captain Planet and Sailor Moon danced in twirls of light on a flickering tube television. In that world, of which Gordon was the sole survivor, Gordon couldn’t love anyone at all. 

Much less someone like Barney. 

If Barney had been waiting for him to say anything, he was disappointed. But Barney probably knew him well enough that he hadn’t been expecting a heartfelt speech. Instead, Gordon just sat there, breathing slowly, breathing in time with Barney, and let himself have a moment of peace with his friend. 


	3. Barney Calhoun Meets His Match!

The tests were...variable.

The best thing to do was to set the bar on the ground so that any sign of the kids being able to do division was a pleasant surprise. This worked very well, and Gordon ended up being fairly pleased by the number of students who displayed some competencies in geometry. Granted, there were a larger number of them who couldn’t do long division, but Gordon wasn’t holding that against them. 

The most promising sign was that everyone did fairly well on the logic and reasoning questions, the kind that tested intelligence over knowledge. They could be taught. Probably. 

So far, the biggest issue was that nobody was at the same point. The vast majority of students fell in a vaguely middle school point, generally capable of adding but confused at the prospect of adding in algebra, but others had worked out the algebra for themselves and aced the world problem portions. 

Gordon decided to design his lesson plans to involve a class period of catch-up introduction to order of operations and basic tools for problem solving, and then move onto algebra. After some deliberation, Gordon decided to focus the lessons on formula and equations that would prove the most useful for factory workers and soldiers. That meant geometry, algebra, and light physics. Physics was useful for everyone. Enough physics and you could start engineering, and  _ that  _ was when you could start cooking with gas. 

That Sunday, he rode the rickety street trolley with Alyx again, watching her twist some loose string liberated from a hoodie of hers Barney had hemmed the previous night around her fingers in a strange cat’s cradle game. She arranged the string in a particular shape, and presented it to Gordon. Mystified, he stuck his hand into the hole. Alyx tightened the string, and it looped easily around his wrist. 

“Hah!” Alyx said, after she had slipped her hands free of the string. “You stuck your hands in the headcrab’s jaw. Rookie mistake, Doc.”

“Will we have to amputate?”

Alyx nodded in mock-seriousness, inspecting the thin strands of string that looped around his wrist. “We can replace it with a submachine gun, if you want.”

“Prosthetic technology has come quite far.”

When they stepped inside the classroom it was lightly populated, students clinging to corners and awkwardly avoiding each other’s eyes. In the back, Simon and Kevin already sat, sullen and distant, and in the front Klaudia anxiously rearranged her pen and pencil. Gordon could see little doodles in the top corner of her paper. 

As he set up his briefcase Alyx casually greeted one of the students walking through the door, dragging several people into a light and smiling conversation, and Gordon was thankful for her once again. She would make a good leader of the rebellion, if that was what she wanted. She seemed fine with leaving the job to Barney for right now, but Alyx was well-regarded enough that she could join up anywhere in the Rebellion - from coder to soldier to leader - and be welcomed. 

Of course, the same could be said of Gordon. But it had to be different for her. She had dedicated her entire life to the rebellion, and she and her small yet strange family were a pillar of it. There was no point in being afraid of a commitment that was already made. Had it been made? Had Alyx chosen the rebellion, or had there been no alternative?

Experimentally, Gordon tried smiling at a student - Emily, no tongue, hard eyes. She stiffened when he made eye contact, eyes skirting around the room. Gordon gave up - he had never been very good at looking polite. 

When the time hit ten, Gordon clapped his hands to draw the class to attention. Everyone’s mouths stopped moving, eyes fixing on him directly without blinking, breaths caught in wait. 

Gordon picked up a piece of chalk and, without saying anything, drew a diagram on the board. He sloppily drew a watchtower, a lone sniper sitting at the top of the tower, and a cartoonish little Hunter on the ground. He gave it angry eyebrows, and sketched out a triangle from the sniper to the Hunter. He put the chalk down, turning around to face the class. 

“Today, I am going to teach you all combat science,” Gordon said calmly, making the familiar sign for ‘combat science’ in the pidgin, and when Alyx repeated his words it was impossible to mistake the ripple of excitement that rang through the crowd. “How does the sniper use physics to shoot the enemy?” The class didn’t respond, but Gordon had been expecting that. He tapped the chalkboard. “They have to calculate the distance to their target, first of all. They also have to figure how far the bullet will drop over that distance, account for drift from the wind, and the effects of temperature, air pressure, and humidity. If you’re shooting from a far enough distance, you may even have to account for the Coriolis Effect. Do any of you need me to define any of those words?”

They did, and Gordon quickly explained the Coriolis Effect and why temperature and air pressure may impact the trajectory of a bullet. “This is all geometry,” Gordon continued explaining, keenly aware of the way every student was paying rapt attention to him. “I can teach you the more basic version today.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Of course, real snipers use drop sheets and spotters...I didn’t have any on me at Black Mesa or after, so I just calculated this all in my head…”

Everybody stared at him, wide eyes. Jakob bravely raised his hand, and after Gordon pointed at him sketched out a sentence in rough pidgin. “How did you use sniping to plug the ‘Bine?”

“Oh.” Gordon scratched his neck awkwardly again. “Well, there was this one time on the dam…but I’ll tell you after I explain the pythagorean theorem. You might want to take notes.”

Everybody grabbed their pencils, and Gordon got to work. 

By the end of class, everybody basically understood how to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle, even if Gordon had to take a detour and explain the concept of formulas. He should have focused on formulas first, but..well, there was a reason people got degrees in how to do this. He sent everyone home with ten questions to practice formulas, and two questions on triangles, and hoped it would be enough. 

How could it be? How could what they were learning ever possibly be enough to actually do anything meaningful with this information? 

At least they’re learning what it’s like to be in school, Gordon told himself. At least this way, maybe, they know enough to understand that their children needed to be educated. It was strange to think of it that way - to think of the long game, to think of their children and their children’s children - but he knew it was how Barney and Alyx were thinking. 

Eventually, class ended and students filed out slowly. But just like last time, three students stayed behind: Simon, Kevin, and Klaudia. Klaudia stood by her desk, anxiously looking down at a piece of paper and creasing and uncreasing it, but Simon and Kevin were bent over a piece of paper on the desk furiously whispering to themselves as Simon prodded the paper. It was as if they hadn’t noticed the class had ended at all, too wrapped up in their work. 

The doctor’s office flashed through Gordon’s mind, the two brothers waiting impatiently for their own appointment. Gordon approached them, distantly aware that Alyx was chatting with another group of students just outside the classroom, and awkwardly nodded at the two boys. On a hunch, he switched on his tablet. 

“Look, it’s not an actual y. The y means something else. It’s like - like a box that we put a different number in, okay? It’s just a concept - Dr. Freeman?”

Gordon waved hello, and went through the laborious effort of typing what he was about to say into his tablet. “Any issues?”

Simon flushed. Kevin hadn’t looked up, still struggling over a piece of paper filled with scrawled writing and crossed-out letters. “We’re fine. Kev’s just bad with abstract stuff. He’s real snipe at long division, though.”

It wasn’t really that abstract of a concept. Gordon didn’t know how to teach math to someone with brain damage. He wasn’t sure if he could. Was even it important that Kevin learn? He wasn’t about to be doing combat science anytime soon. Kid was destined for a life of factory work, and he probably wouldn’t even know enough to be dissatisfied with that. 

In Gordon’s infinite tact, tastefulness, and social skills, he asked, “Why are you two here?”

Almost immediately, Simon’s face flushed in anger. His pale cheeks went ruddy, and a scowl broke out across his sharp and thin face. “We have as much right to be here as anyone else! I’m a soldier for the Resistance, they said that anyone who was interested in an education could come here and learn!”

Okay. Gordon scratched his neck and pointed at Kevin. Immediately, Simon bolted up, glowering at Gordon. As if he was ready to fight him, raring to throw a punch. Gordon couldn’t tell if it was the height of idiocy, or the height of something far more powerful than he could ever understand. 

“It’s not his fault!” Simon said, and the tablet scrolled his emotionless words through the screen in strange contrast to the raw pain written across his face. “They kidnapped him! I fucked up, I got a rap, and they told him it was - it was him or me, and he picked him, okay? Now my entire family’s bad association, Kev doesn’t act like Kev, and the world doesn’t make sense anymore!”

Then Simon abruptly stopped speaking, eyes wide, and Kevin looked up from his paper and suddenly looked very frightened. Simon bent his head down, mouthing soft words that the tablet didn’t pick up on, but clearly calming his brother down.

Gordon looked over his shoulder, trying to see what frightened them so much, but all he saw was Alyx, hand on the gun she kept strapped to her hip. Gordon quickly asked what was wrong, but she just shook her head. 

“I’ll escort you two out,” Alyx said verbally, the tablet scrolling out her words. “Come on, let’s go.”

The two boys quickly left with Alyx, and Gordon was left alone with Klaudia again, as confused as ever. Instead of nervous she just looked thoughtful, her notebook clutched to her chest. 

“He’s very loyal,” she said, more to herself than Gordon. “I didn’t know fash cared about their families.”

“I doubt he’s a sympathizer,” Gordon typed out, making Klaudia start. “Did you need something?”

“Dr. Freeman!” She signed out his pidgin name, clearly startled, before moving back to speech. “Sorry, I - but you know, they did it on purpose. It’s almost genius, really.”

Gordon tilted his head, questioning her.

She flushed, clearly uncertain of what to do with his attention, and tucked the notebook under her arm so she could lean on the pidgin. “ ‘Bine have more than enough soldiers to occupy all of us,” she said, signing out the slang for the Combine, along with pressing her hands together to signify total domination in occupation. “They didn’t need to get humans to serve as the cops - the Overwatch.” She made the sign for human with her left hand, then pressed it into the sign for Overwatch - pigs. “It was to break us. Our parents, our spouses, our siblings...turned into demons.” She made the sign for cuckoo bird. “Some joined voluntarily. Some were coerced, either by the ‘Bine or by their own families. Mothers thought that, by sacrificing a son, the angel of death would pass over them. But nobody was spared, in the end.” She trailed off awkwardly, the sign for ‘angel’ almost the same as the sign for Gordon’s own name. “Humanity first,” she said concurrently with the pidgin word - the sign for human over the sign for Earth. “Everyone believes that. Humanity first, death to invaders. But people these days tend to think in black and white. Good and evil, you know. Why not? There’s good guys and bad guys in this world. For humans you’re good, against humans you’re bad.” She paused again. “People like Kevin...even people like Simon...are little better than the invaders. Bad. There’s no room for ambiguity in this world.” She looked at him, eyes pleading. “Is that something you can teach? Can you teach us, how to tell who’s good and who’s bad? How to survive, how to keep going even though it’s hard? What’s the point of living if life is nothing but struggle? I’m tired, Dr. Freeman. I’m only twenty, and I’m really tired.”

Gordon couldn’t help but stare at her. Visions of Vortigaunts on Xen flashed through his mind - how he had killed them indiscriminately, without even stopping to look in their eyes, scared and alone.

The first Vortigaunt he had paid attention to was one that he had wounded. A bad shot, blew off his leg instead of his head. Gordon had stood over it, loading his gun so he could kill it quickly, and he looked up just long enough to stare into his eyes. 

What he saw wasn’t animalistic. It wasn’t even hate. It was pleading. Begging him, almost. Not to spare his life - it wasn’t crawling away from him, trying to get away. It had been leaning in. Begging Gordon to kill it. Death, Gordon knew now, was better than a lifetime in slavery to the telepathic monster Gordon had went on to kill. Had it been called anything? He had never found out.

He had killed him immediately, of course. Gordon didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t have time for regrets. But that night, as he stared into the ceiling of the pulsating honeycomb cave, he had thought of those eyes. He had wondered if those eyes had ever contained anything else - happiness, sadness, fragility, love. If there was something, anything, more to life than the flash of a gun. 

Maybe this world, where there was good and evil and nobody was capable of understanding anything more complicated than that, was well-suited for him after all. 

Out of lack of anything better to say, Gordon weakly signed, “Me too.”

That, at least, she understood. Klaudia smiled at him thinly and politely, and took her notebook out from under her arm to show him, flipping to a specific page and pressing it into his free hand. Gordon looked down at it. 

It was a mock-up of a flyer. In big, ballooning letters across the top, it read ‘Attend the FIRST RESISTANCE SHOOTING COMPETITION! Show off your SKILLS! Win a BIG PRIZE! FREE FOOD!’

Everything everybody cared about, honestly. There was a little cartoon picture of a resistance soldier who looked a lot like Alyx shooting a headcrab with a bullseye painted on it speared on a stick. It was cartoonish and exaggerated, but it was a surprisingly good drawing. Underneath the drawing, the location and date were suggested. In letters running across the bottom, it read: “Held by the New Paris Community Education Center Class of 20XX.”

Gordon looked up at Klaudia, who suddenly seemed embarrassed. He typed out on his tablet, “Is this your idea?”

She nodded, cheeks red. “Me and some of my friends. We think it might be a fun way to drum up interest in school. And a good way to use what we’re learning. And - have fun? Maybe? I know the Resistance has a party budget, if I fill out a form I could probably requisition some food and a prize.”

He handed the notebook back to her. “It’s a good idea. Talk to Alyx about it, she can make it happen. Try not to plan parties during class, though.”

Klaudia clutched the notebook, eyes wide, and nodded fervently. “Yes! See you next week, Dr. Freeman!”

Without further ado she rushed out of the classroom, and Gordon watched her go, confused. He was left standing in the middle of an empty classroom, leaning against his desk, completely uncertain of what to do next. 

This wasn’t MIT. These weren’t college students, spoiled and ready to learn. This was so far outside of Gordon’s comfort zone it wasn’t even funny. Why had they assumed he could do this? He was a stranger in a strange land, a foreigner, incapable of understanding the values or priorities of any of his students. They were separated by more than a language barrier - they had an impenetrable cultural barrier, built by the thick walls of time and trauma, and Gordon didn’t know how to scale it. 

He didn’t know how to reach Barney. How could he? Barney had twenty years of horror behind him, and Gordon was still acting as if he was the same person he had always known. Was Barney Calhoun, the Barney that had laughed with Gordon and teased him, even still in there? Or had he been twisted and warped into the Barney that Gordon now came home to each night, distant and strange?

Alyx was raised in this foreign land, and even if they knew how to hurt in perfect tandem Gordon just couldn’t understand her. He couldn’t help her, couldn’t be her dad or her uncle or anything more than a cold and distant friend and roommate. Gordon didn’t know how to comfort or support or stay. All he knew how to do was pull a trigger, calculate how to hit a target without a drop table, fire an RPG. What good was that? Who was helped by that?

But maybe it was more than him. Alyx and Barney couldn’t understand each other either. Alyx and Eli loved each other, but sometimes Gordon saw Eli looking at his daughter with a kind of distraught confusion - as if she had grown up into a stranger. Simon and Kevin, Klaudia, Uriah and Sammiah, humans and vortigaunts and math and physics - was any of it understandable? Was anybody comprehensible to anyone?

Was it even worth it to try? 

Gordon stood alone in that empty classroom, ruminating on everything that he normally avoided thinking about, worrying about everything that he couldn’t change, until he no longer felt like himself and the person he had always been. As if he really was the messiah after all, as if he was genuinely a good person who only wanted to help those around him. As if he cared about anybody besides himself. 

Gordon wondered when humanity would rediscover those shades of grey. When they would find out that he was really a bad person after all. If he wanted it to happen. 

It didn’t matter if he wanted it. It was inevitable. Right?

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it took Gordon a solid two weeks to figure out that Alyx and Barney were fighting. 

In his defense, it was ridiculously easy to have a conversation behind his back. Gordon had been busy with the class, with grading and testing and worksheeting, and he was slowly getting more and more invested in helping the students do well. He spent his free time catching up on the literature, helping Eli out in his lab and working on the portal technology, and practicing his shooting. He wasn’t home that often, and he and Alyx and Barney were rarely all in the same room together. 

It took a while for Gordon to notice that Alyx and Barney were  _ never  _ in the same room together. Whenever Barney entered Alyx left, and when she dropped by the lab or the range to hang out with Gordon, if Barney happened to be there she quickly turned around and fled. Gordon hadn’t bothered trying to find an explanation for her behavior, because he didn’t really care, but it continued and became more and more egregious. 

Sometimes, when Gordon left his room at one am to walk off a nightmare, he found Barney and Alyx yelling at each other. They always guiltily stopped when he walked in, and pretended that nothing was happening, but it could only happen so many times before Gordon got suspicious. 

No, it was more than that. It could only happen so many times before Gordon realized that he cared. 

Normally he wouldn’t get involved. They could sort out their own issues. It wasn’t as if Gordon would be here for much longer anyway. It was only a matter of time before the Gman found a new contract for him. 

But…

Well, he did live with them. And it was getting annoying and somewhat tense. If Gordon noticed that something was tense, that meant that it was overwhelming to anyone else. 

He finally scraped the bottom of his very deep reservoir of patience when he was sitting at the folding kitchen table playing Texas Hold ‘Em with Barney (between Barney’s natural bluffing skill and Gordon’s immaculate poker face they were an even match) and Alyx walked in through the door. She stopped short when she saw Barney, eyes wide, probably surprised that he was home so early. Then she turned on her heel and walked straight back out. 

Barney didn’t react, except to sigh and discard a few cards. Gordon shuffled his cards around in his hand, trying to read his expression. He just seemed tired, but that was nothing new. 

“So,” Gordon said delicately, once he put his cards down on the table. They didn’t tend to talk during card games, mostly using informal one handed signals they had hashed out years - twenty three at this point, Jesus - ago. “Is there something going on with you and Alyx?”

Surprisingly, and somewhat insultingly, Barney looked startled as he put his cards down. “How did you tell?”

Gordon gave him his most unimpressed look. 

“Look,” Barney said guiltily, “remember when you asked me why Carol wasn’t at her desk? When she was two months into her maternity leave? And you hadn’t even realized she was pregnant?”

“In my defense,” Gordon said quickly, “she wasn’t directly relevant to my life, so there was no reason to remember she existed.”

Barney barked a short laugh. “Same as ever, Gordon. Don’t worry about it.” He picked up his cards again. “Can we go back to the game?”

They did, but Gordon was silently stewing. They played without talking, sitting with blankets over their laps in the cold apartment, out of a lack of anything better to do.The radio was on, but Barney didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it. No television - for the past twenty years it had only played propaganda, and now programs were limited to the cartoons and shows that were less obvious propaganda in a desperate attempt to entertain somebody, anybody. Computers were strange, and not really used for entertainment purposes. 

So people played cards for fun, or drank, or talked. Gordon was almost bored. He hadn’t killed anything in weeks. He was getting antsy. Maybe, once the semester was over, he could ask to be put back on active duty, helping wipe out alien nests. Nobody liked putting him on the field, since he was apparently ‘too valuable’, but if they needed his skill enough they’d let him out...and they always needed his skill, eventually. Maybe…

He put his cards down as Barney folded a hand. “I’m not the same person,” Gordon said, strangely desperate for Barney to know this. “I’ve changed too.”

Barney looked at him, bags under his eyes stark in the dim yellow light. “Nah. You’re the same as ever, Gordon. You kill headcrabs just like you write physics papers. Easier, even.” He drummed his fingers on the table, eyes distant. “Weird how for you it’s only been...what, two months? God, that’s bizarre.”

“I wasn’t a patron saint of death two months ago,” Gordon pointed out. “Do you think that hasn’t affected me? Seriously?”

Barney shrugged. “Not that I can see.” He picked up his cards again, flashing a weak smile. “Look, man, it’s a good thing. It’s nice that at least someone’s kind of untouched by this, you know? It’s kind of comforting to me. At least someone survived. Let’s just play.”

“I don’t want to play,” Gordon found himself saying. “I want you to be honest with me. What’s going on with you?”

Strangely, Barney’s lips twitched into another smile, but it was wry and without happiness. “You really don’t want to know what’s going on with me.” He seemed to realize what he said, because he quickly added, “It’s boring, Doc. Work stress. Just like Black Mesa, huh?”

“No, it’s not,” Gordon said, surprising himself. Two months ago, he would have taken the out Barney was trying to give him. Two months ago, he would have died rather than talk to someone about their feelings. Was it the world that had changed, Barney? Or was it Gordon? “Nothing’s the same. We can’t pretend that it is. You’re fifty fucking years old, dude.”

“Forty seven.”

“Whatever! Jesus!” Gordon lightly slapped the table, ignoring Barney’s wince. “You practically have a kid. What’s going on with you and Alyx?”

Barney exhaled harshly, expression tightening. “Nothing,” he signed clearly and sharply. “We’re just having a disagreement. Just between me and her, not as a commander and a lieutenant.” 

Translated: it’s none of your business. Gordon wished he believed that. “What  _ about _ ?”

Barney leaned back in his chair, throwing up his hands with frustration, gritting his teeth. “It’s not important. She’s just refusing to get an actual job. All she’s doing is messing around and hanging out with her friends. It’s a waste of resources, and she’s a valuable resource.”

Was that it? Was that what they were fighting about? Gordon blinked, caught off-guard. It was so weirdly…cold. Barney wasn’t cold, he was warm and loving and affectionate. Wasn’t he? ”Isn’t this a conversation she should be having with Eli?”

“Eli’s a great dad, and he loves her, but his version of parenting is teaching her how to drive a tank and run undercover missions, not getting her to eat her vegetables,” Barney said sharply, almost bitterly, with long experience. “As a person, he just doesn’t know what to do with her. God, neither do I. Why can’t she just commit to something? She’s as important to the Rebellion as we are. Eli passed over leadership to me, but I’d want to give it to her as soon as she’s old enough. She’s a genius hacker, she could be reprogramming Combine interdimensional portals right now. She’s a fine soldier, she could be leading troops in the field. But instead she’s - what, hanging out with her friends? Translating for you? I don’t get it.”

Absentminded words several weeks ago echoed through Gordon’s mind. “She’s twenty four, man,” Gordon said cautiously. “You remember what it was like at that age. You couldn’t even pick a major. You’re asking a lot of her.”

“Humanity needs her,” Barney said, looking away from Gordon. “I had the luxury to be a fuck-up, she doesn’t. She has to be better than me, than Eli. Even than you. She can’t afford to find herself right now. But she never listens to me! All she does is tell me that I’m pushing her away or whatever.” Barney scrubbed at his face. “I’m not, she’s just - you don’t get it, Gordon. If anybody had known that she was my family while I was undercover - I couldn’t  _ admit  _ it, Gordon. We’re at war, I couldn’t just admit it.”

“The war’s over,” Gordon said cautiously, feeling severely out of his depth. “Alyx knows that. We fought so hard so she could have this time. The Combine retreated. We’re not at war anymore.”

Barney pressed his lips together, scrubbing his face with his hands, hunched over. In pain. He didn’t look at Gordon as he said, “If you believe that, then you really haven’t changed. It’s not over. It doesn’t  _ end _ . Nothing ends, it just gets worse. I’m trying to teach her. She needs to know how terrible and cruel life is if she’s going to survive. I’m just trying to protect her. I need - humanity needs her to survive. But she’s not  _ listening  _ to me.”

Something roiled strangely in Gordon’s stomach. It wasn’t quite fear, as Gordon didn’t feel fear like other people did. But it was how he felt when he stared down the barrel of his gun at an enemy, when he was swimming deep in water and he was quickly losing oxygen. As if something was constricting him, something that wanted to hurt him. As if he was in danger. 

Sammiah’s words flashed through his mind. Gordon wondered if Barney had ever talked to Sammiah about what was hurting him. He doubted it. In a strange flash of empathy, Gordon wondered how often Alyx had seen Barney lie and deflect and smile, unable to help. Unable to heal injuries that reopened every day, bleeding sluggishly and incessantly. 

Barney wasn’t looking at him, and even if Gordon had anything to say he wouldn’t see it. He was left to sit at a rickety card table, under a flickering light, useless as he had ever been. 

He tried reaching out, squeezing his arm reassuringly or putting his hand over Barney’s, but the minute his fingers brushed Barney’s skin the other man flinched away. He stood up suddenly, eyes averted from Gordon, refusing to listen to him. 

In sharp, abrupt motions, he made a familiar hand signal, and walked off so he could disappear into his bedroom. Gordon stared at the door as it closed shut behind him, incapable of helping or understanding. 

I fold, Barney had said. I fold. 

It wasn’t until the next morning that Gordon found Alyx beating up the rest of the Resistance. 

She didn’t come home that night, staying out long after Gordon and Barney went to bed and leaving before they woke up. Eli hadn’t known where she was, or Uriah. Eventually Gordon found himself drifting towards the one location he always found her in whenever she was stressed - the Resistance gym. 

He hung around the back of the crowd that inevitably crowded around her, watching her dominate the sparring ring. Her enemy was someone Gordon recognized as a friend of hers, a tall and burly man, and he watched her dispatch him in barely a few minutes. He couldn’t have done it any better himself. She had been getting better. Alyx would say that he was a good teacher, but Gordon thought that maybe she had been even more driven than usual lately. 

The next sparring partner stepped onto the mat after the loser, giving her a second to wipe the sweat away and drink some water. She spotted Gordon then, looking surprised, and Gordon waved limply. He kept to the back of the crowd, unwilling to take attention away from Alyx, and watched her dive into her fight with her new opponent. She moved quickly, precisely, and powerfully. She fought without flourish or rigidity, fluid and loose and adaptable with a casual brutality. The way she sparred was different from the way she fought - in a real fight she would have hamstrung her opponent and ended it immediately, but against her friends she stretched it out to allow herself the opportunity to flex her martial skills. 

Finally, her opponent slapped the floor and yielded, and Alyx’s sweat-drenched face stretched into a smile and she reached out a hand to help the other girl up. They laughed together, clapping each other’s backs, and Alyx waved off the next opponent to chug some more water and slide off the mat to give the crowd a chance to take a turn. She jogged over to Gordon instead, still panting slightly, but smiling at him unreservedly. 

“Up for a rematch, old man?”

“Three years older than you,” Gordon reminded her, for the fiftieth time, but he found himself softening in response to her. “Not today. I just wanted to talk to you.”

She looked surprised, and he didn’t blame her. She clutched at her chest exaggeratedly. “You been replaced by an evil clone, Doc?”

“Do those exist?” Gordon asked, suddenly concerned. “Those don’t exist, right?”

“Duh!” Alyx laughed. “Come on, that’s so ridiculously sci-fi. The alien invaders would brainwash us to do their evil bidding, not make clones. That’s such a waste.”

“Right, my mistake.”

He waved her inside the locker room, leaning against the wall outside and watching the new fight until she emerged in her usual outfit with slightly damp hair. Her wet hair uncurled a little, seeming longer, and she groaned as she did something mysterious to tuck it into a bun. 

“I need to cut it again,” Alyx groaned with one hand, quickly freeing her other one. “I hate to admit it, but I really don’t know how to take care of it. I don’t want to just keep buzzing it short, but I just don’t know what else to do with it. This is what happens when you’re raised by exclusively men and aliens.”

Gordon, who was unfortunately extremely devoid of natural hair care tips, shrugged helplessly. “I had a ponytail until recently.”

Alyx gaped at him as they walked through the gym, stopping at the cubby area. No lockers. Maybe no need. “No shit? In real life, bro? Hand to god?”

“It was the nineties,” Gordon bluffed, as if he ever actually remembered that it wasn’t still the nineties. It was hard to believe that, once upon a time, his biggest worry had been Y2K. “Everybody in tech had ponytails back then. It was very normal.”

But Alyx just shot him a skeptical look, pulling her rucksack and jacket out of the cubby and shrugging on the jacket. She had started coating it in pins and patches - she had pointed to the pin that read FREEMAN LIVES as her favorite many weeks ago, and he saw a new one that read out RESIST THE SYSTEM. She also had a patch that displayed the strangely popular electrical resistance current, a hand with an eye in it and the word ‘BORN’ underneath, and a strange little flag that had purple, blue, and pink on it. A week back he had helped her stitch a giant Lamda on the back. Which...Gordon still didn’t get the whole lamda thing, but whatever. Freeman and the lamda went together like Christ and the cross, apparently. “Did every ponytail look so greasy?”

“Look, so - you already knew about the ponytail,” Gordon accused, at Alyx’s slowly growing smirk. “You just wanted to see me squirm!”

In response, Alyx drew out her wallet and pulled out a photocopy of a picture. It was just a piece of printer paper, black and white ink smeared in low quality across it, but when Gordon squinted closer he saw that it was a picture of him. Him and Eli at a company party, ‘96. In the blurry background he could make out Barney, almost unrecognizable if it wasn’t for the fact that Gordon  _ remembered  _ that party, remembered Barney chatting up that girl, his eyes locked on Gordon. 

“Barney didn’t like me carrying this around,” Alyx said, after passing it to him for closer inspection. “I told him that nobody would recognize him, all in the back like that, but he made me hide it for years so the fash wouldn’t confiscate it when I’m arrested.” She made it sound as if her getting arrested was a foregone conclusion. Maybe it was. “But come on. My dad? Hanging out with  _ Gordon Freeman _ at a company party? I was so proud. It made me feel...I don’t know, special.” Alyx’s mouth thinned, looking away. “But I was always special.”

They left the gym, squinting at the blare of the sun, and they found themselves wandering to the plastic bench in front of it. They sat down, Gordon’s eyes still on the crumpled photocopy of a photograph, a memory of a memory. 

“I remember this…” Gordon said, after putting the picture on his lap. “I didn’t want to go. Hated interacting with my coworkers. But Barney dragged me. He always wanted me to get out more, talk to people who weren’t him. But I never left his side at those parties...too misanthropic.” He half-smiled, lost in a memory, dimly aware of Alyx’s wide eyes. “Guess we were a matching set back then. I had no languages in common with anybody else, sound amplification devices like hearing aids don’t work for me, reading lips is a crapshoot...I didn’t know your dad too well. I didn’t know anybody too well.” Gordon looked down at the picture, at the thick crush of people within. All dead, now. All gone, and Gordon hadn’t learned most of their names. How strange. “For so long, I’ve been content to just...survive, I guess. At Black Mesa, when I first came here...I was just surviving. I knew that. But I think...even before then...I wasn’t really trying to be happy. I guess I thought I was fine being isolated, but I think it was really just a...half-life. Incomplete.” Gordon wasn’t smiling in the picture. He looked like he didn’t want to be there. Did he know? That there would be no more parties, no more friends or cameras, not ever again? “A half-life. It was barely a life at all, I think.”

When he looked up, he saw Alyx staring at him, expression closed off and strange. He passed the picture back to her, and she silently folded it back up and replaced it in her wallet. 

“I used to eavesdrop on Barney and Dad,” Alyx said slowly, choosing her words deliberately and signing them clearly. “They were always open with me about Resistance business, but...some things they thought I was too young to know, I guess. But I remember Barney asking Dad over midnight drinks if he ever felt like he wasted his life. He said that he spent so long trying to get his life together and then suddenly, it was like it was over. As if everything that happened before the war was his real life, and now this is hell.” Alyx shrugged awkwardly. “Or maybe life before now was a good dream, and humanity woke up one day to face reality. That one seems more realistic to me, I think.”

“What’s going on with you and Barney?” Gordon asked, finally getting to what he really wanted to talk about with her. “He said you two were fighting.”

Alyx scoffed, crossing her arms before uncrossing them. “Usual shit. He keeps saying I’m wasting my life, that I have to go take up his and Dad’s swords. Whatever. He’s so confusing. One minute he’s being all overwhelmingly parental, the next minute he’s telling me that I can’t call him Uncle Barney even in private. Like, what is he so paranoid about?”

“He does consider you family,” Gordon said gently and uncharacteristically. “I think he’s just worried about you.”

“He doesn’t get to be worried about me,” Alyx said, hands cutting through the air sharply. “He gets to be worried about me when he stops acting like he’s just my boss. He gets to be worried about me when he stops doing his robot impression that the fash beat into him. He _gets_ to go all dad mode on me when he admits that he was there for me just as much as my actual dad was. When he acts like he _loves_ me.”

“You know he does love you,” Gordon said awkwardly, “right?”

But Alyx just looked bitter. “Really? Because he’s literally never said that to me in my life.” Gordon raised his hands, about to speak, but she waved him off. “Yeah, yeah, he shows me he loves me through yelling at me about how I’m wasting my life and shooting ‘Bine for me, whatever. I get it. He does. But I need - I just need -” She paused, expression tightening. “Is it selfish of me? To need something from him that I don’t know if he can give?”

Gordon didn’t know. He shrugged awkwardly. 

“The person in that photo...you’re the only person alive who remembers him. Whoever that person was, I think Barney killed him. When he sees you, it’s like that person’s back, and he’s all smiling and happy and acting like he’s freaking my age. It’s weird.” Alyx looked away, mouth thinning. “Why can’t he act like that with me? I don’t need another soldier in my life. I just need him. Why can he smile at you like that but not me?”

Gordon...still didn’t know what to say. But maybe he didn’t need to say anything. Alyx’s words were pouring out of her, as if she couldn’t keep them in any longer. 

“He’s  _ never  _ going to admit how he feels about you. Ever. He’s going to keep it locked up and never talk about it and die having never done anything about it because he needs to punish himself for...whatever he did! He’s such a freaking -” She signed that derogatory term for an old person again, which Barney had recently mentioned meant ‘Boomer’. Was it a reference to older humans and their proficiency with grenades? Gordon didn’t get it.

But Alyx was still talking, growing more and more frustrated. “He just doesn’t get that this life is all we have. I’m not going to keep on telling myself I’ll be happy  _ later _ , that  _ someday  _ things will be okay. I’m going to be happy now. This life is all I get, and I don’t know how much longer I have, and I’m not going to waste time self-flagellating when I could be enjoying what time I get. Why doesn’t he get that?” Alyx’s expression crumpled. “He got twenty seven years of happiness. I didn’t get any. You two got childhoods, I didn’t. You two got to be teenagers, to go to school, to go to college. I didn’t. You two got farm animals and trees and flowers and the sea. I don’t. Now I’m just trying to be happy however I can and he keeps on telling me I don’t  _ deserve  _ it because things might be bad again soon? Who cares!” Alyx threw out her hands empathetically. “The war’s never going to end and things will never get better and I don’t give a shit! I want to have a life! Why can’t I just live?”

Then Alyx was crying, and Gordon frantically slung his arm around her shoulders and gave her a small hug, rubbing circles into his back, and he waited for her to finish sniffling and look embarrassed over showing emotion. But mostly she just looked miserable, a long-held misery that went far beyond momentary sadness or discomfort and stretched into a life-long pain that never went away. It was a misery carried in her heart, and the heart of everyone like her, for twenty years, and nobody seemed to know how to put it down. Alyx and Barney didn’t. 

Maybe Gordon didn’t either. Maybe everything that he was he carried deep inside his chest, locked up tight, and he didn’t know how to put it down. If he did - if he ever figured it out - would that wound heal? Would it scar over, and stop hurting? 

Or, like old aches and pains from bullets and fangs, once something hurt you did it hurt forever? 

“It’s not his fault that he can’t be the kind of person to me that I need him to be,” Alyx said finally, hands shaking. “It’s not his fault that he’s just...so messed up. But I’m messed up too. Because of life, and - and a little bit because he gave some of that messed up to me. He couldn’t help it, but - but Barney and Dad and Magnusson and Kleiner and Uriah gave their messed up to me and now I’m going to carry it for the rest of my life. Until I give it to my kids, and they give it to their kids, and it just keeps going and going. I don’t want to be like them. I want them to just - to just get over everything and give me what I need. But they don’t know how to give it. And maybe I don’t know how to have it.” She laughed a little as she wiped her eyes. “Isn’t it so messed up, Doc? Aren’t we so messed up?”

There was nothing to say. Gordon hugged her, and he sat in silence with her until they both had to get up from their bench and go back to work. 

So now Gordon understood a little bit more. It did not make him feel any better. Actually, it actively made him feel worse. 

This wasn’t a problem Gordon could fix. It made him feel helpless, and more than a little useless. When he confided in Sammiah about his feelings, he recommended that he pray to the Freeman - it always made him feel better! 

Honestly, it felt a little unfair. Why did the rest of the world get a messiah who they could always rely on, who would always save them? What did Gordon get? He was always left holding the bag. He could fix the world but he couldn’t even mend the hearts of his best friends. He felt altogether a little useless - which, according to everybody, he should fix by praying to himself. 

Stupidly, he even gave it a shot. Late at night, sitting in the courtyard on a bench by himself and staring at the infinite milky way, he decided to swallow his pride and try it. Even if it was just to see what all the fuss was about. 

“Dear...Gordon Freeman,” Gordon signed to the sky, using the Resistance’s pidgin name for him instead of his own. “I need help. I finally found a problem I couldn’t fix by myself. Can you…”

What could Gordon Freeman do? Punch the problem? This couldn’t be punched. There was nothing Gordon could do, and nothing Gordon Freeman could do. Nothing could ease this pain. He was worried he would carry it for the rest of his life, Gordon and Barney and Alyx, endlessly hurting each other. 

The night sky was so beautiful. When he had first entered Black Mesa, his favorite thing about it had been how pretty the stars were in the New Mexico desert. Back then, it felt as if he could see the whole galaxy just beyond his fingertips. If he stretched out far enough, he was only inches away from plucking the stars down from the sky. If he just stretched a bit further…

Experimentally, Gordon reached up his arm, and tried to grab a star. But they stayed out of reach, thousands of light years away, distant and foreign. He had stepped foot on alien planets. He had killed the spawn of those stars. He had overtaken those far-off planets, and destroyed them. 

One final prayer, to the only entity who could possibly fix this for him. 

“Gman,” Gordon said into the night, “if you’re going to do it, do it now.”

But nothing emerged from the night. No pale, gaunt face manifested from the darkness. It was just Gordon, as it had always been. 

Abruptly, he felt ashamed. He didn’t want the Gman to do it. He wanted to stay. Spending the next week, month, year, fighting for his life again...it wasn’t better or worse. It was just more pain, of a different kind. 

Maybe he should go back to White Forest. Just do science, work with Kleiner, like the way things used to be. Never worry trying to solve problems that couldn’t be fixed. Never worry if he even could. Be Gordon Freeman, alone, as he had always thought he was meant to be. 

But even that wasn’t the solitude that Gordon both feared and wanted. He still had to live in this broken world - but unlike everyone else, he had another option. The Gman would pick him up eventually. He could leave. Leave to go fight somebody else’s war.

There was no relief. No break. Either he stayed here, and dealt with the endless struggle against his friends and his own trauma, or he escaped to another conflict and fought for his life again. Either way, there was no happiness. 

Was there? Maybe, someday in the future here, would things be okay? Did Gordon want to go the rest of his life without finding out?

Hm. Gordon had the bad sense that he would have to take responsibility for the rest of his life. 

Where was Gordon Freeman when you needed him?

The next day, he tried to make up for his moment of weakness by helping everybody set up for the shooting competition. 

It was honestly no surprise that Alyx had enthusiastically gone forward with Klaudia’s idea, and they had borrowed the printing machines normally used for the incredibly popular underground zines to push out flyers. They had even gotten the announcement on the daily morning announcements that Gordon, obviously, never listened to. The base had been buzzing about it for the last few weeks, the kids enthusiastically throwing around pidgin bragging about their shooting accuracy and how great they were at bumping off the invaders. Everybody wanted a chance to prove their skills, and have fun. Fun was in short supply these days. 

Even Barney was coming. Gordon knew that excited the kids too: the Resistance brass attending a shooting competition? Maybe they were recruiting! I’m going to get into the elite soldiers, just watch! I’m joining the honor guard! No way, you’re nowhere near good enough. Yes way - I’m going to serve alongside  _ Gordon Freeman! _ Yeah, right - he’s way too busy teaching us combat science! Haven’t you heard? He’s educating humanity! He’s going to lift us up, rise humanity back to how it used to be! No, no way - we’re going to be better, aren’t we?

They were going to be better. They were going to be so, so much better. Gordon could see that already, in the way that every new city was a mix of people held in diaspora from all across the world. From the way he saw two men holding hands, two women exchanging affectionate kisses. The way that the new government was being built bare-handedly by the people, pushing forward socialist ideals and disregarding the corrupt and broken capitalist system. Something better was being made. 

Gordon kind of wanted to see it. 

Somehow, these thoughts ended up with Gordon helping make food for the competition, letting another Resistance member patiently teach him how to spit-roast headcrab. He chopped food with finesse, even showing off a little with knife tricks - it was easy, just like killing things - and bowing sarcastically when all the other volunteer chefs clapped. He watched in interest as Magnussen made ice cream with dry ice, proudly showing Gordon how to flavor it and beat the cream smooth and rich. He helped Uriah and Sammiah set up the targets, carried weaponry back and forth and helped check over the guns to make sure that they were clean and maintained, and set out tables and chairs in the courtyard. 

Soon enough, as the midday sun lowered into afternoon, more and more people began to gather close by. Older men set up chess tables, jowls flapping in familiar banter, and people began exchanging bets in chewing sap and energy drinks. 

More than anything, he saw his students - rushing up to him and smiling at him, signing out in fluid pidgin or clunky ASL that they were happy he could make it, that they would definitely win for him. He saw them everywhere, helping out - Emily was cooking the meat, Jakob was carrying five folding chairs under each arm, Adam and Gabriel sat on the ground helping clean guns. All twenty of them were there, throwing themselves into the work and the event that they had planned together. Klaudia directed them all with a confident smile on her face, explaining to some of her friends how to sign people up for the event. 

Well, eighteen. Two were missing. Gordon wondered if he was going to see them. 

Volunteers speared tiki torches into the ground, someone pressed headcrab barbecue and a powdered drink into his hand as they insisted that he sit down and relax, and people slowly began to trickle into the event. Gordon contented himself with watching.

Alyx had been running around more than anybody else, as always, but at some point someone must have commanded her to relax because she eventually wandered over near Gordon too. She sat down next to him, the dimming sun casting her strong cheekbones and her smile, always too wide for her mouth, into soft relief. 

“I’m so excited to see some sharpshooting today. Are you going to participate, Doc?”

But Gordon just shook his head. “It’d be unfair. Who’s the favorite of the pool?”

“Me, obviously,” Alyx said frankly, “but I told them to take me off, since I’m not participating either. I want someone who could use it to win, you know?”

“What even is the grand prize?” Gordon wondered. “Besides the attention of the brass.”

But Alyx just looked mischievous. “You’ll see.” 

“If you are auctioning off a date with me, I really blatantly refuse,” Gordon warned her. “I’m not participating in that.”

“Aw, really?” Alyx pretended to pout. “Not even if he’s cute?”

The pronoun threw Gordon, but maybe it shouldn’t have. He had caught her in broom closets with both boys and girls, which - well, he wished he hadn’t. “Not even if she’s cute,” Gordon said solidly. “Auction off Barney instead, he’ll be popular.”

“No, he made us promise to stop putting him on recruitment posters,” Alyx said frankly, terrifying Gordon deeply. “Speaking of which, is he going to -”

“Yeah, he’ll be here as Chief,” Gordon said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

But Alyx just smirked again, also terrifying Gordon. “No way. I’ve been thinking about our conversation, and I decided that I have a plan.”

“Don’t like the sound of that.”

“All my plans are great, Doc!”

“My back  _ still  _ hurts in cold weather.”

“It’s not my fault you suck at driving cars!”

“Yes, Alyx, I suck at launching cars at a hundred miles per hour off a giant ramp. That’s what I’m bad at. I’m so sorry.” But Gordon couldn’t fight the smile either. “Besides, I thought Gordon Freeman was good at everything?”

“I don’t know,” Alyx said, “he’s  _ really bad  _ at doing the dishes.”

“I said I’ll do them tonight!”

“You’ll be too drunk - hold on.” Alyx perked up, waving at a small cluster of people several yards away. “Sorry, Doc, those are my friends, they promised to teach me some trick shots. Will you be okay by yourself?”

“Sure,” Gordon said, waving her off. “Go have fun with your friends. I’ll see you at the competition.”

She ran off quickly, shouting something and waving her hands, and Alyx melted into the crowd. Gordon watched her go, happy she was happy, happy that they could have this. 

Words from a few days ago flashed through his mind, Alyx’s tears. She was as optimistic about her future as Barney was pessimistic, but in the end they had said the same thing: that the war would never end, not for them. What did it mean, that they both knew it, but one of them could accept it and the other still raged against the injustice? 

Maybe Gordon was no better. They had been so honest with him, or in Barney’s case as honest as he was capable of, but Gordon had never disclosed that he was expecting the Gman to pick him back up any day now. His war was hardly over either. It never would be, not until some faceless enemy finally got lucky. 

Three people. All so different. One a refugee from the past, one always looking to the future, one straddling two worlds. Maybe it was the strangest coincidence, the most wonderful miracle, that they had all found each other. That their lives had met. 

A large crowd had gathered around the shooting range, almost everyone in the courtyard save for a few older drifters eating food and talking near the firepit, and Gordon watched as a familiar figure climbed on top of a milk crate and clapped his hands for attention. Everybody looked up at him, eagerly waiting to hear the opening address from the familiar figure, ready to show off their skills in front of everybody. Next to the milk crate stood other people Gordon recognized as the Resistance brass, dressed more casually than usual. 

Barney Calhoun, Chief of the Resistance, delivered what was probably a very stirring speech. The crowd seemed enraptured, anyway. Gordon considered pulling out his tablet, but he eventually decided not to. He focused his attention on Barney instead: at his remarkably unlined face, at his young and strong body despite his age. At his height, at his muscles. He was smiling, but it was reserved and professional, nothing like the wide grin that used to overtake his face. His eyes were as tired as ever, empty and cold where they once crinkled in some eternal joke that only Barney understood, but probably only Gordon would notice something like that. 

In short, it was just Barney, different and the same. Different, in almost every way, but still Gordon’s friend. Maybe that was the only thing that really was important: that Gordon cared about him as much as he ever had, maybe more. Maybe in a different way. 

No matter who he was, no matter who time would turn him into, he was just Barney. Gordon was hardly the same person either. Maybe they could be different together, if he let him. 

Finally, Barney chopped down a hand, and the competitors took their stations. Klaudia, who was standing nearby, shouted something, and the whistle in her mouth jostled as her cheeks puffed out. Thunderclaps echoed through the air, shaking Gordon’s sternum, and straw flew out from the targets. The crowd clapped, some people waving their hands or exchanging money. 

Food flew off the buffet tables onto plates, and older men crouched around the firepit and talked as they kept an eye on the competition. Young people, soldiers, bragged to each other as they took their places at the starting line, squeezing triggers and laughing as they showed off their skills. In the midst of it all was Alyx, laughing, doing some tricks with her gravity gun to the awe of the onlookers. 

Eventually a small figure emerged from the crowd and ran towards the secluded spot that Gordon had sequestered himself in, and as the figure ran closer he saw that it was Klaudia. Her face was flushed, sweat dripping down her brow and making her black hair lie flat, but she enthusiastically threw pidgin at him the minute she got close enough. 

“Alyx Vance - Gordon Freeman - competition - bet - come quickly!”

Uh oh. Gordon shook his head, holding his hand up and trying to refuse, but Klaudia shot her best big puppy dog eyes at him and he was forced to acquiesce. The crowd parted around him as Klaudia dragged him towards the shooting range, a respectful stillness of hands and mouths as Gordon approached and was pulled through the crowd. He was deposited, stunned, right next to Barney, who had his own personal bubble around him and looked severely unamused. Alyx, for her part, had her favorite rifle slung over her shoulder and was grinning mischievously at the both of them. 

Uh oh. 

“So I’ve been talking with Doc’s students,” Alyx started, and Gordon exchanged a terrified look with Barney, “and they’re all telling me that I’m the best shot in the Resistance.”

Jakob, standing next to her, shouted something, and after Gordon looked at Barney he obligingly translated. “We’ve been using geometry to get more accurate shots!”

Another student, Gabriel, perked up and shouted something else. “Knowing combat science makes me totally want to be a scientist like Dr. Vance,” Barney translated, uniquely pained. 

“But,” Alyx said, and Gordon now noticed that she was signing for him and then saying her words verbally, “some others are saying that Chief’s the best shot.”

Emily, who was lingering behind Klaudia, popped out and said in perfect BSL, “No way anybody’s a better shot than the Chief. That’s why they made him Chief, right?”

“It’s really not,” Barney said and signed, pained. “It’s really not why I’m Chief at all.”

“Whatever.” Alyx winked at Gordon. “Point is, I propose a bet. Me versus Chief. Best two out of three, who’s the better shot.”

Uh oh. 

No way Barney was going to go for it. Literally half of Gordon’s class was clustered around them, as well as plenty other members of the Resistance. But when Gordon glanced over to look at Barney, he actually seemed contemplative. As if he was  _ considering  _ it. 

“I’ve been shooting for thirty years, Alyx,” Barney said, both verbally and in sign.

“And I’ve been shooting most of my life,” Alyx said flippantly, “I’m sure I can keep up.”

“I survived Black Mesa.”

“What,” Gordon said, “like it’s hard?”

Barney groaned. “What’s the wager?” 

Alyx’s smirk widened into a shark's grin. “If you win, then I’ll apprentice under Uriah to take up coding and hacking for the Resistance, full time, for at least three months.”

At that, everybody’s eyes widened. Barney’s eyes narrowed, but Gordon abruptly began sweating. It was exactly what Barney had been pushing her to do for weeks, probably longer. “And if I lose?”

Alyx smiled sweetly at the both of them. “Then you have to ask Doc on a date.”

The entire crowd around them went wild. Barney abruptly began yelling something indecipherable at Alyx, who just laughed. Gordon was gobsmacked. 

A date? A date, a date? A date with Barney? What, like, to a restaurant? Were there restaurants in the future? Would they have to do it at the Commissary? That wasn’t romantic. Whose place would they go to afterwards, they lived together! Who would pay?!

“You’re being ridiculous,” Barney yelled, Gordon just managing to read his lips. He wasn’t good at it, but there was no way he was missing this. “The man’s straight, Alyx!”

“Then he doesn’t have to say yes.”

“It’s going to make him uncomfortable, I’m not some sort of -” Barney said something that Gordon didn’t catch.

“Let him decide that,” Alyx said impatiently, then said something else that Gordon didn’t catch. “ - or are you scared?”

“I’m not - ugh!” Barney snatched the gun that a student held out to him, glowering at Alyx and switching over to sign. “We are  _ talking  _ after this.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Alyx said sweetly. “Now soldier up and shoot.”

Yikes. Gordon was pretty sure this was the plot of at least half a dozen greek plays. Still sniping at each other, Barney and Alyx took up position at the shooting range, clearing the other competitors out. So far as Gordon could tell they were at a sort of half-time, judging by the way most of the competitors had drifted off to go scarf down food. Most of the crowd now was Gordon’s students, who interestingly enough seemed to be rooting for Alyx. 

Klaudia, as officiant, made a fuss about getting everybody behind the spectator line, of readying her whistle, and of listing off the rules. Gordon guessed that they were standard - you get a certain number of points for how close to the bullseye you get, and you get three shots. Whoever had the most amount of points at the end won. Somebody went out and pushed the targets further away, apparently in response to some of Alyx’s heckling. They were impressively far away - Gordon could have hit a bullseye at that range, but he doubted anybody else could. No matter how good the soldiers were, it was difficult enough to just hit the target at that range. 

But Alyx didn’t seem intimidated. She just seemed confident, heckling Barney as they took up their positions. Barney ignored her, eyes fixed on the target, teeth gritted. Gordon never remembered Barney as being a particularly good shot, but things changed. 

Klaudia’s mouth moved, and then she slammed her hand down. Immediately, with the heavy thunderclaps of a rifle that Gordon was so familiar with, the guns jerked in the hands of both his friends. The muzzle flashed a brief white light, sending spots in Gordon’s vision, again and again and again, until all that was left was the acrid tang of rifle discharge in the air. They lowered their guns, stepping away from the firing line, and Adam ran forward to bring the targets in. 

With great ado, and with the entire crowd crushing around the pages, Adam laid them both out on the floor. Everybody scrutinized them carefully, judging by consensus. 

For the range, they both had done very well. Barney scored two eight pointers, close to the Bull’s eye, and a nine pointer. He didn’t make a show of looking proud of himself, but Gordon knew that smile. Almost nobody else in the Resistance could have done it. 

Then the attention turned to Alyx’s. Two nine pointers and a bulls-eye. 

The crowd went wild. Barney groaned, and Alyx fist-pumped. All of her friends applauded, whistling and clapping her on the back, signing out the pidgin for success, for warrior, for hero. Alyx laughed, teeth flashing yellow in the setting sun. She shook hands with Barney, who seemed somewhat sheepish. He said something to her, and she said something back, and Alyx surprised all of them by pulling him into a tight hug. 

She clutched onto him tightly, almost desperately. Gordon expected Barney to clap her on the back and release her, his usual one or two second embrace that he gave to any of his friends, but to his surprise he found Barney clutching her tightly too. Almost desperately, Barney put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her in close, whispering something in her ear. 

In that moment, it was as if nobody else was there but the two of them. Just Alyx and Barney, as it had been for so long, desperate driftwood of a family tying itself together. For the first time in a long time, Barney let himself need someone, and Alyx let him. 

Then they released each other, Alyx wiping her eyes and Barney squeezing her shoulder. When Barney caught Gordon’s considering look he flushed and looked away, clearly embarrassed, but Gordon just nodded. He had already known. There was nothing to hide. 

Or maybe he was embarrassed about something else. Gordon took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, and for the first time pushed out of his mind everything he thought he knew. Every expectation, every preconceived notion, everything he thought he felt. Everything he thought he was. 

Gordon looked at Barney, and he saw - and he felt - 

Something so big it was terrifying. Something that was so deep he felt as if he could drown in it. Something that took his breath away, as if he was falling from a watchtower at five hundred feet. Something that felt like being safe, something that felt like being alive, something that was more dangerous than anything he had ever felt. 

Well, Gordon thought to himself, as Barney stoically accepted Alyx’s teasing, life’s short. 

Eventually the group broke up and the competition resumed, everybody ready to put their best foot forward. Gordon retreated again, uncomfortable with the attention, and sat at a bench a fair distance away watching the proceedings. The sun was setting, soft yellow sun giving way to purples and oranges, and it wasn’t long until the competition would be wrapped up and someone would break out the moonshine. 

But for today, and for right now, Gordon let himself watch. He watched two young men, with straw-blonde hair and determined expressions, approach the sign-up table. The taller man, with a slightly distant expression that was unusually sharp in focus, managed to bend down and sign his name on the paper. They approached the competition ground cautiously, hesitating on the edges, only coming closer when Klaudia beckoned them in. 

She tried to give Simon a gun first, but he shook his head and gestured to Kevin. Klaudia hesitated, almost drawing back, but something determined and strange crossed her face, and she pushed the gun into Kevin’s hands. He held it firmly and steadily, perfectly practiced. 

Would it be unfair, for him to participate? No, according to Kevin’s file, he hadn’t had that kind of augmentation. However he competed, it would be at the same level as the rest of them. Gordon watched him approach, watched him wait his turn in line. He was nervous, shifting from foot to foot. Simon was whispering in his ear. Everyone around them was looking at the two men strangely, some of them drawing lines across their necks or stepping away. 

But finally, Simon drew away too, and Kevin took his place at the starting line. He breathed in, and exhaled slowly. A calm expression blossomed across his face, perfectly at peace, as if this was the one thing in his life that he had always known, that was always the same. Kevin lined up his gun with the target, inhaled, exhaled, and shot. 

He shot with complete confidence and security, and no hesitation. In regular, machine-like patterns, he shot off round after round after round. When Klaudia called something out again he stepped back with the rest of them, flicking the safety on and lowering the gun, looking out over at the target in something almost approaching surprise. As if he hadn’t expected a target to be the thing that he was shooting.

In that moment, for the first time, Gordon saw himself in Kevin. Not in his daily life, or in his circumstances, or in the way he was treated. But in the way that he held that gun, as if it was the only thing he had been born to hold, and in the methodical precision of his shots, as if there had been no other choice but to hit every target. 

But when they put up the scores on the leaderboard, and everybody saw Kevin’s string of perfect bullseyes, something utterly foreign happened in Kevin. Simon was clutching at his arm, expression enraptured, as he yelled something in Kevin’s ear. Kevin smiled - slowly, and small, then growing bigger, into a grin as bright as Alyx’s. Simon threw an arm around his brother’s shoulder and shook him, yelling and congratulating him, but Kevin couldn’t seem to take his eyes away from the leaderboard. 

The competition ended soon after that, and the winner was clear. Kevin had been the only participant to score even bullseyes across the board. The crowd clapped sparsely and spottily, but as Alyx beckoned Gordon into the crowd he saw Barney leading the group in his strong, confident applause. 

Annoyingly, but not surprisingly, Alyx pulled Gordon into the front of the group. Barney stood next to her, smiling faintly, and next to him Kevin stood, terrified. Barney said a few words to the group that Gordon didn’t care about before turning to him. 

“The grand prize was a picture with you,” Barney signed, because of course it was. He gestured at Klaudia, who held a prized polaroid camera in her hands. “Are you willing?”

Gordon shrugged. He beckoned over Kevin, who awkwardly shuffled closer to him, and on impulse he threw an arm around the man’s shoulders. He stiffened, but Gordon just flashed a deadpan peace sign at the camera, which Kevin hesitantly copied. 

The camera flashed, the group clapped, and Kevin held the picture as if it was gold itself, this perfect memory under a night sky. Maybe his first good memory in a long time. 

There would be more. Gordon had to believe that. 

Then someone hoisted a giant jug of moonshine, and  _ then  _ the party started. 

Almost thirty minutes later Gordon was supremely zoned out on an abandoned patch of grass, begging off socializing or any celebrations with anybody. Definitely avoiding any drinks. He was entertaining himself by staring at the night sky, picking out the million constellations. Orion, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Aquarius...at least they were the same. It was somehow nice to know, that something like that could be so familiar. 

When electricity was returned to every home, when the cars came back, light pollution would reign over New Paris again. The air would turn smogged and cloudy again, and the sky would be flat black with a few pinpricks for satellites and planets. He would miss that, when it happened. 

But Gordon could always return, to that New Mexico desert blanketed by stars. Maybe Alyx would be with him, or Barney. He could point out every constellation to Alyx, every picture and story told throughout history, created by man and persisting long into the future. That was something that his generation could give her, that precious knowledge that only they knew. 

It wasn’t until a black mass shifted next to his vision that he saw that Barney had settled down next to him. He looked faintly sheepish, rubbing the back of his head as he sat cross-legged next to Gordon. 

“Uh. Hi.” 

Maybe that was what he said. It was pretty dark. Barney seemed to realize this, and he pulled out one of his miniature flashlights from his armored suit and flicked it on before setting it down between them. They were sitting close together, knees brushing, and both of them seemed to realize that at abruptly the same time. Gordon felt strangely awkward, and Barney scratched the back of his neck again. 

“So,” Barney said awkwardly, shadowed by the light of the flashlight, “you were probably wondering what me and Alyx bet on.”

“Not really.”

“Yeah, you never did pay much attention to that stuff.” Gordon furiously scratched the back of his neck, before moving into furiously tapping his toes. “So basically she said that -”

“I can read lips, you know,” Gordon said, faintly amused, and Barney shut up. “I’m not good at it, and I don’t like bothering, and it’s a crapshoot at the best of times, but it is something I’m mostly capable of doing.”

“Oh. I, uh, didn’t know that.”

“You don’t know a lot about me, dude.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” They sat in silence for a while, overlooking the celebrations. Finally, Barney cautiously said, “Then you know that, uh, Alyx made me promise to ask you on a date.”

“Yep.” 

“So, that’s a no, right?” Barney asked quickly. 

But Gordon just tilted his head at him, strangely having fun. “I think you’re going against the spirit of the agreement. You have to actually try here.”

“That wasn’t in -”

“Okay, chicken.”

“Ugh!” Barney gritted his teeth, hands hovering in the air, before exploding with movement. “Fine! Fine! I’ve had a crush on you for ages! I am never admitting how long! I like you a lot, and I’ve been wanting to ask since the war ended but I’ve been way too scared. If it wasn’t for Alyx, I would have - I would have been too scared for the rest of my life. Okay, there, I said it, now you can say no and Alyx will finally stop bothering me about this. There.”

They sat in silence for a minute, Barney’s chest heaving, Gordon staring at him. 

And he called  _ him  _ the weirdo. What a strange man, 

Finally, Gordon shrugged. “Sure. I’ll go on a date with you. ”

Barney’s jaw dropped. “Sure? But - but you’re straight!”

“I never said that,” Gordon pointed out, in his eyes quite reasonably. Besides, some part of him was enjoying shocking Barney so much. It felt - well, it felt nice. That he could surprise him after all. 

“You have - you have  _ never  _ talked about guys, ever -”

“I’ve never talked about girls either,” Gordon pointed out again, still reasonably. 

Hilariously, Barney opened and closed his mouth, still gobsmacked. “I just - I figured you weren’t really, you know, into the whole dating thing -”

“Come on, man.” Gordon rolled his eyes, smiling lopsided at Barney. “Haven’t you heard? It’s a new millennium. The past’s a different country. Things are different here.”

And Barney looked at Gordon like -

And Barney looked at Gordon like he was happy to be alive, for the first time in twenty years. As if the fact that it was a new millennium was amazing, and wonderful, and thrilling. As if the future was opening up in front of him, golden and real and special no matter how fragile it was, and that it could be good. 

For him, for them, for all of them. For humanity. Maybe, just this once, things would be okay. Things were capable of being okay, if not now then later, if not later then someday. Things would be okay again. 

Barney looked at Gordon as if he had told Barney all of this, and for the first time in twenty years Barney believed it. 

For the first time, Gordon felt as if he had given somebody hope. 

**Epilogue**

“So then I’m like - okay, shit. I don’t actually have a wife and kid. I’ve been using the kid as an excuse for why I can’t join up with the transhumanist forces for months. I’m going to have to go to this mandatory Overwatch barbecue, and I’m going to have to bring at least one member of the family I don’t have. And I figure - hey, Alyx’s been asking me to take her on an undercover mission for months, right?”

Gordon buried his head in his hands, shoulders shaking with laughter. 

“Keep in mind at this point her dad mostly knows me as the guy that slept on his couch for like a year and is also perfectly morally alright with being a fascist cop. Oh, and yeah, I worked for Black Mesa. As a fascist Black Mesa cop, only unironically. So when I ask him if I can borrow his six year old daughter to pretend to be  _ my  _ daughter at a company picnic, of course he goes - sure! Of course! Great idea preparing her for undercover missions in the future!”

Gordon is wheezing with laughter. This is, somehow, the funniest story he’s heard in twenty years. 

“Alyx, of course, is ecstatic that she gets to pull one over on the fash. So I wrangle her into a dress, I pull her hair into buns, I have, like, five panic attacks, and then I bring the daughter of the leader of the revolution to the cop barbecue. And, like, it’s really a barbecue. There’s volleyball. The police chief is grilling some hamburgers, because we still had hamburgers at this point. There’s children playing tag. I step into the park, in my fucking khakis and polo, holding the hand of a random six year old who I know for a fact has a knife strapped to her thigh...and I’m thinking what the fuck am I doing? What the fuck is my life?”

“Oh my fucking god,” Gordon managed to sign out, and Barney took a long swig of his drink. They were in a rare, intact piece of French countryside, sitting on a picnic blanket with some scavenged food spread across it. The countryside wasn’t beautiful, not like the Impressionists lovingly portrayed it, but the grass was growing again, and the sky was bright and blue. 

“I almost turn around right there. Pretend that she’s sick or something, whatever. But then Alyx sees a group of kids playing with some sticks, and she just runs forward and joins them. She’s so confident, so completely comfortable, and she takes over the gang of children in two seconds flat. And I’m like...okay, maybe I can do this. I can schmooze and act like a fascist and play volleyball. I can’t get out-spied by my baby niece. That’s just pathetic, right?”

“It’s pretty pathetic,” Gordon agreed, sipping the water from the canteen they brought. He popped some of the strange cheese in his mouth, it bursting apart in a floral arrangement of a strange flavor on his tongue. 

“Anyway, that’s how Alyx ended up biting Wallace Breen in the leg.”

Gordon spat out his water, cackling with laughter, and Barney laughed too. 

“No way.”

“She drew blood! I swear to god, she drew blood!”

“Oh my god.”

“Her dad was so proud of her! Like, she got extra ice cream that night! For taking first blood from Wallace Breen!” Barney shook his head, still amazed. “Then the next morning she passes over one of her little girl stationary papers with fucking Lisa Frank dolphins on it, and it’s  _ full  _ of the stationed posts and routes of Overwatch cops. This  _ six  _ year old had gotten confidential information on military movement from  _ other six year olds _ . It was fucking ridiculous.” He looked down at his water, frowning slightly. “I’m out of my drink. Damn it, did I leave the thermos in the car?”

“I’ll grab it.” Gordon stood up, dusting the dry dirt off his jeans, and accepted the thermos from Barney. “Be right back.”

Barney smiled at him, lopsided and strange. “Be back soon. You still have to tell me about the wacky shit you got up to as a kid.”

He had promised that, hadn’t he? Barney had wanted to learn more about him. How strange. But Gordon just mockingly saluted. “What makes you think I was a child?”

“Please don’t say shit like that, you know I’ll believe you.”

Gordon laughed again, light and free as the French wind tousled their hair, and he jogged off. 

The car was parked at the bottom of the hill, about five minutes away, and Gordon skidded his way down the soft incline. He kept a hand on the gun strapped to his thigh, keeping his eyes open and looking around for any rogue elements, but it seemed as if they really were alone. As if they were safe. 

He didn’t want to mention this to Barney, but it was actually his first date. He had never really been the type for dating. Nobody had ever really seemed interesting. He didn’t know what they were supposed to be like, or what you were supposed to do on them, but a picnic in the French countryside as you kept an eye out for aliens to snipe seemed pretty picturesque.

Finally, he skidded to a stop in front of the Hummer. He walked around to the back, popping the trunk and pulling out the forgotten water bottle nestled among the firearms, and when he lowered the trunk he saw a figure sitting in the front seat. 

His water bottle was on the ground and his pistol was in his hands before he could think about it, aiming it at the figure. He was sitting rigidly in the seat, face turned forward, sitting at the driver’s seat and staring out the windshield. Something about the crisp suit, all harsh lines and angles, was familiar. Something about the thrum in Gordon’s teeth was familiar. 

Then the figure’s head turned around. Not his body, not his torso - his head, twisting around one hundred eighty degrees like a demented owl. His neck twisted with the motion, and Gordon wondered with a sick fascination if there was a crack. The face had sharp cheekbones, gaunt and sickly skin, and it was unmistakably the Gman.

Strangely, impossibly, Gordon calmed. He holstered his gun, staying where he was. It wouldn’t help. 

“Mr. Freeman,” the Gman signed, fluid yet choppy, precise and perfect, but with his monotone expression that could have been carved in rock it was impossibly strange. “What a delightful day. Are you enjoying your date?”

Gordon stared at him. There was nothing to say. 

“I thought so,” the Gman said. He looked around them - at the idyllic countryside, at the parched and dead earth. “Truly pleasant. You’ve acted effectively. As usual. I am here to offer you a ride.”

Gordon stared at the man in the suit. His heart wasn’t thumping in his chest. He wasn’t scared or angry. He felt very clear. As if what was happening was what was always meant to happen. 

“If you enter this car,” the Gman said, “you will travel somewhere far away from here. Somewhere with a war to fight and win. There will be conflict, yes, but also glory. Will you step inside?”

Gordon slowly raised his hands. “What if I say no?”

The Gman stared at him, unblinking. Gordon stared back, refusing to give ground. Refusing this. He set his jaw, and he did not accept this. He couldn’t. 

“Then I will leave you,” the Gman said, shocking Gordon. “For now.”

“You’ll - you’ll leave me alone?” Gordon asked frantically, calm shattered. “You won’t take me again?”

“I never said that.” The Gman was silent for a long, awkward moment, never taking his eyes off Gordon. When he lifted his hands again it was deliberate, and slow. “When you grow tired of this quiet life, Doctor Freeman, I will be here. I will be waiting. And do not mistake me. You will grow tired of it. You were not built for happiness, Doctor Freeman. There is no happy ending for you. When you desire my services again, I will come. You will taste victory and ashes again.”

Gordon raised his hands, then lowered them. He wanted to - he wanted to argue. He wanted to insist that he was getting better, that he was more than a hero or a murderer or a monster or a messiah. That he was just Gordon, just himself, and he deserved a future just as much as everybody else did. That he wasn’t wrong or twisted or strange - and even if he was, then it didn’t make him inhuman. He wasn’t a weapon. 

But instead, what he said was, “Dude, can you buzz off? You’re crashing my date.”

And, in the space between blinks, he did. Gordon was left alone again, and he slowly bent down to pick up the water bottle. He looked around, suddenly disoriented and disturbed. Part of him expected to be in a train station, in a testing laboratory, on Xen, in Black Mesa, but he was just here. In the countryside. In France. In Europe. On Earth. 

Gordon shrugged, tucking the bottle in his baggy pocket, and started hiking back up the hill. He found his hands twisting out a half-remembered song as he climbed, dancing along to a melody composed only in his own head. 

“They said Mr. Freeman smelled like a corpse,” Gordon sang to himself, as he rose further and further into his future. “They said Mr. Freeman went to space with a fork. They said he did it to eat aliens all night. They said don’t worry, he’s coming back tonight!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! This is probably all the Half-Life I'll write, so please leave a comment if you liked it or reach me at theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com!

**Author's Note:**

> This story is in three parts, is completed, and will upload probably on Fridays. I can be found at theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com if you want to talk about why I wrote a fic for a game I've never played!


End file.
